This paper focuses on the production of cosmopolitan capital among students participating in the DC Public Schools Study Abroad Programme, an initiative that has been lauded as shifting the narrative of equitable access to global learning. We draw on a framework of Bourdieusian ideas about cultural capital, as well as community cultural wealth perspectives to illuminate findings from a multi-year, mixed-method study of the programme. Our focus is on how students, many of whom identify as belonging to minoritised groups within the US, experience global travel and its varying effects as related to the production and expression of cosmopolitan capital. By examining how cosmopolitan capital is mobilised and enacted in a myriad of ways by youth in a globalising urban space, we engage and contribute to the literature on internationalisation and elite making, inviting a more relational definition of 'elites'.