Higher education in general and study abroad programming in particular are hardly strangers to stringent demands for accountability. What is new to higher education and to study abroad is the demand for accountability in terms of measurable student learning outcomes. This article is a first report from a system-wide initiative to document learning outcomes accruing from participation in study abroad. It focuses on one element of that initiative, a comparison of several outcomes between study abroad participants and non-participants attending sixteen varied public institutions within a state university system. The authors describe and interpret the data they have collected in Phase I of a six-phase, multi-year University System of Georgia project that is annually collecting data from more than 4,000 students. The authors trace the growth of the assessment movement in higher education and point out that institutions often define success in study abroad through such things as increases in study abroad participation or through post-program surveys that attempt to measure student satisfaction with their study abroad experience. They argue that neither these nor other sorts of measures now commonly in use provide direct evidence either of students' curricular content knowledge gained abroad or the cognitive understanding that they are presumed to have acquired. This paper presents the first set of findings from Phase I. (Contains 1 table and 7 notes.)