The global tourism industry has deep ties within the institutional structure of higher education made possible by a neoliberal order dictated by the North onto Southern nations. I seek to understand the ways in which short term higher education volunteer programs bolster (or do not bolster) this neoliberal order based on the interactions between student volunteers and local communities. I contest that these programs feed into neoliberal development narratives by sending student volunteers from the global north to cities in the global south that are seen as predominantly Indigenous and/or ‘underdeveloped’ in western standards based on previous studies on voluntourism programs. However, these studies do not examine the structure that universities use when offering volunteer study abroad initiatives. This project seeks to fill a gap in research connecting universities directly to global sustainable development and the overarching neoliberal agenda by analyzing voluntourism in Cusco, Peru.