How does short-term study abroad affect students' attitudes toward human rights? What role does study abroad play in human rights education? This study assesses the learning outcomes of two study abroad programs that aimed to promote human rights education. I applied a mixed methods approach to measure the changes in the opinions of students who completed my courses in two countries with poor human rights scores: The Gambia and Vietnam. I expected that The Gambia course would push the students toward ethnocentrism, and the Vietnam course would push the students toward ethnorelativism, but I was wrong about the impact of both courses Intergroup contact theory provides the best theoretical framework for explaining these unexpected learning outcomes. My findings suggest that we need to question the compatibility between human rights education and study abroad in terms of learning objectives.