That sounds like such a borderline case; it could either code as travel, or education, or something totally different. In the future, you could try to look up the merchant by its MCC (merchant category code) on the Visa Supplier Locator site:
https://www.visa.com/supplierlocator/search/index.jsp. This should hopefully give you some certainty how a particular merchant codes on Visa cards.
If it’s a sizeable charge, you could press your case that you had a reasonable belief that a “
travel study program” would count as “
travel,” and if that’s not actually the case it wasn’t made clear to you, and ask if Chase could extend you a courtesy — as a long time and valued customer — by crediting you the points this one time. If you don’t have any luck the first time, try a few more times. I’ve read some success stories of one time courtesy adjustments.
Good luck!