The recent increase in the provision of cross- and intercultural education for sojourners has not been matched by commensurate research into its effects on participants. Evaluation, where undertaken at all, has been largely confined to expatriate business contexts and has tended to be undertaken pre-sojourn. Crucially, evaluation has not engaged with the adaptation, adjustment and performance of sojourners related to their actual lived experience of adjustment, or with any key outcomes of sojourns. In response, this mixed-method, two-stage study explored both the adjustment and adaptation of student sojourners, with a particular focus on those studying cross-cultural communication (CCC). In stage one, analysis of results of 'international' postgraduate students (N = 680) at a UK university over a five-year period indicated that those doing a degree in CCC tended to perform significantly better over different measures of academic achievement than a closely comparable peer group following a similar programme which lacked a specific focus on CCC. Stage two tracked longitudinally the academic adjustment experiences of 18 students of CCC over the course of their programmes. Findings provided a fine-grained view of the experience of academic adaptation and adjustment, and hitherto rare indications of how and why CCC education might 'work'.