University of Michigan University of Michigan students stand amid the Roman ruins in Merida, Spain, during a recent study abroad trip.

As college programs grow, so do the risks

By Ron French / The Detroit News

tudy abroad programs are more exotic, popular — and potentially dangerous — than ever.

    Attractive to college students who want to see the world and valuable to universities seeking a recruiting edge, overseas study is at an all-time high. Yet lax oversight and inadequate student orientation have led to injuries and deaths of Americans overseas, and put many more at risk.

    It’s a situation so unwieldy and unregulated that students and parents can only guess about the safety of particular study abroad programs or countries. While many schools have tightened security in recent years, there are no mandatory safety standards, no statistics tracking risks and no rules requiring the colleges to be accountable to state or federal agencies.

    And the dangers are likely to increase. About 125,000 students went overseas in 1998-99, up from 76,000 just five years earlier. Each year, the ranks of international studies participants grow more than 10 percent, with Americans traveling to more than 150 countries.

    A Detroit News investigation into study abroad programs found:

* Students routinely sent to countries that the State Department has warned Americans to avoid, such as Bosnia, Lebanon and Uganda. In 1997, for example, 18 U.S. college students were sent to the Central African Republic, a nation with such civil unrest that the U.S. Embassy closed and ordered all federal employees home. “Americans ... are strongly urged to depart at this time,” read a March 1997 State Department travel warning.

* Students sent to nations considered too dangerous for even Peace Corps volunteers.

* One in four colleges does not require students to have health insurance before going overseas.

* Wide discrepancies in safety policies used by universities.

* A reluctance by colleges to pay for services that measure global risks, common among corporations sending executives around the world.

    Still, U.S. colleges are scrambling to open programs around the globe as study abroad has emerged as an effective recruiting tool. In the process, many universities have added precautions such as emergency evacuation plans and 24-hour hot lines. But others do little more than hand students airline tickets.

Safety questioned

    Studying abroad is often a highlight of many students’ college careers, and most return to the United States with a greater understanding of the world around them.

    But as the number of students signing up for overseas classes grows and programs expand into more exotic locales, safety concerns mount.

    Disturbing recent incidents include the brutal slayings of Emily Eagen of Ann Arbor and her friend, Emily Howell of Lexington, Ky., in Costa Rica in March. Howell, a student at Antioch College in Ohio, and Eagen, her friend and a former Antioch student, were abducted and killed in an area of Costa Rica known for drug trafficking and crime.

    In that case, the 19-year-old Howell and another Antioch student, Shaun Sellers, were sent to Costa Rica without faculty supervision, and without a Costa Rican contact to help orient them to the foreign culture. They were left on their own to find a place to live. Their contact with the school consisted of one e-mail a week.

    Leaders in the study abroad field have called the Antioch case a recipe for disaster.

    “That is absolutely irresponsible,” said David Larson, director of the highly regarded study abroad program at Beaver College in Pennsylvania. “I have a real problem with that.”

    The actions of Antioch “borders on criminal,” said Michael Bradley, director of international programs at the University of Maryland-Baltimore.

    Officials at Antioch, which has a well-established overseas program, deny putting the students at greater risk, but concede the two women slipped through the cracks of their usual safety and oversight procedures.

    “Things happened that could have easily happened in any American city,” said Eric Miller, an adviser in Antioch’s work co-op office. “It had nothing to do with being abroad.”

    Miller said the deaths were “extremely traumatic for everyone. But students don’t want to change what we’re doing.

    “You can’t go by the CNN version of the world,” Miller said.

Max Ortiz/The Detroit News Posters plastered across the Antioch College campus in June announced a memorial photography show honoring Emily Eagen and Emily Howell.

List of tragedies grows

    The Costa Rica deaths aren’t the only incidents that raise questions about the safety standards of study abroad programs.

* In 1996, four American students were killed in a bus crash in India. The group, in the University of Pittsburgh’s vaunted Semester at Sea program, was supposed to take a plane on the trip, but organizers changed the plan at the last minute. The bus driver was drunk and had been working for more than 24 hours. The students’ families have sued the university.

* In 1997, Ohio State University student Shawn Wight died of complications after suffering altitude sickness on a glacier in the Himalayas, and being left at high altitude for 10 days. The expedition was run by a university professor. Wight’s parents are suing the school.

* In 1997, a group from tiny Indiana Wesleyan University was in Cambodia during political strife. A bomb exploded a block from them. The group caught the last plane out of Phnom Penh before the airport was shut down by fighting. The U.S. State Department had warned Americans to avoid Cambodia.

* In 1998, a bus load of students from St. Mary’s College in Maryland was stopped by bandits along a road in Guatemala. Five female students were raped. It happened in an area where there had been numerous reports of highway bandits.

* In March 1999, Elizabeth Garland, an anthropology student at the University of Chicago, nearly died when Hutu rebels kidnapped and killed eight of her party in the jungles of Uganda. The Peace Corps had pulled its volunteers out of Uganda in 1991 and kept them out, saying it could not ensure the safety of its workers there.

    Those tragedies are well-known among study abroad professionals. Less publicized are the near-tragedies that occur more frequently. Among those:

* Amanda Edge of the University of Michigan spent June on an archeological dig on the West Bank, hearing missiles roar over her head between Palestinian and Israeli soldiers.

* Rena Floor went to Haiti on a spring break volunteer work program. In one week, her group from tiny Huntington College in Indiana saw a bus passenger fire a handgun at a passing motorist and encountered a corpse while souvenir shopping in a village market.

Students targeted

    What’s surprising is not that tragedies occur, but that they don’t happen more often. Study abroad is a major growth industry on American campuses. The number of students going overseas has doubled in a decade. Universities, promoting their study abroad programs to recruit students, are expanding into more Third World countries.

    American students often are targets of crime in foreign countries, Bradley said. “Americans are very easy to spot. These guys think, not unreasonably, that they (Americans) are more likely to have money than a Ukrainian steel worker.”

    “Students think it’s safer because ... it looks neat,” said Tom Lord of T.W. Lord and Associates, a Georgia company that insures students going overseas. “People think they’re in Disneyland.”

    Those in the study abroad field claim students overseas are at no greater risk than those at home on American campuses. No statistics are available to know for sure.

    While saying few students get into serious trouble, Bradley believes it is dangerous to shrug off risks overseas.

    “I’ve heard people say, ‘Well, Baltimore is dangerous too’,” Bradley said. “But American students can recognize a dangerous neighborhood in Baltimore. In Kiev, they may not. You find this a lot in poorer countries with quaint little villages. There’s a lack of cultural awareness.

    “It’s a matter of being cautious,” Bradley said.

Prestige over safety

    How well colleges are cautioning students to danger overseas varies greatly, Larson said.

    There are “full-service” programs that meet students at the airport, conduct weeks-long orientation programs, find housing and provide 24-hour emergency hot lines for students in trouble. There also are programs that “don’t do much more than send Suzy Smith a letter saying she’s admitted to a program in London in the fall, and Suzy is pretty much on her own,” Larson said.

    At some schools and private companies that book study abroad programs, safety policies haven’t kept pace with the more exotic locales.

    “The programs are very, very bent upon hyping up all the positives to build customers, and they don’t acknowledge the possibilities of danger. They’ve had their head in the sand,” said Charles Schewe of Massachusetts, whose daughter Sara was among four students killed in the 1997 bus crash in India. “The people running these programs are Ph.Ds with no common sense. They come to it without a business perspective. If this were an oil rig, they’d have concern for safety of their workers.”

    In general, schools take more risks with students overseas than corporations do with their executives, said Brett Laquercia of Kroll Associates, a global risk assessment company. Kroll assesses the danger of cities and countries around the globe for international corporations.

    The company has relatively few universities as clients. “I think they’re watching their pennies,” Laquercia said. “The lives of their students and faculty are at stake. The reputations of their universities are at stake.”

    Between 1996 and 1998, U.S. colleges sent students to 16 countries that the U.S. State Department had warned Americans to avoid. For example:

* There were 221 students in Colombia during that two-year period even though the State Department issued five travel warnings urging Americans to avoid the country because of rampant kidnappings of Americans, and violence by drug cartels, guerrillas and paramilitary groups. “U.S. Citizens of all age groups and occupations have been kidnapped ... in all major regions of Columbia,” read a travel warning Nov. 20, 1998. “Since it is U.S. policy not to pay ransom or make other concessions to terrorists, the U.S. government’s ability to assist kidnapped U.S. citizens is limited.”

* Two students were in Sierra Leone in 1997, when fighting was so severe that U.S. Embassy officials fled the country. “Those Americans who remain in Sierre Leone despite this warning should leave immediately, and be aware that there are no U.S. government officials there to assist them,” read a travel warning of June 1997.

* Eight students went to Pakistan in 1997 despite a State Department warning to avoid all non-essential travel. The warning was issued following the ambush murder of four American businessmen who were killed because they were U.S. citizens.

* Ninety-three students were studying in Serbia and Montenegro when NATO threatened military action and Serbia’s armed forces engaged in widespread attacks against Kosovar separatists.

* In 1998 alone, there were 606 American students in Kenya when the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi was attacked. The State Department evacuated the families of embassy officials and alerted “all American citizens to review their personal security and depart the country.”

    What’s more, between 1996 and 1998, American students were in 11 nations from which the Peace Corps had withdrawn volunteers because of danger, including 40 in Bosnia and Herzegovina to 40 in Sri Lanka.

Schools flout standards

    Industrywide safety standards have been developed by the National Association for Study Abroad, but the rules are voluntary. Only 54 institutions signed a letter supporting the standards.

    A survey conducted by the Institute for International Education found that 25 percent of universities don’t require students to have health insurance before going overseas.

    Leaders in the field say universities are becoming more safety-conscious. Many have safety task forces that assess the risk to Americans in various countries, and most provide some kind of in-country supervision.

    “A lot of the schools that were just handing out brochures now are insisting on insurance,” said Lord, with the company providing insurance to students overseas. “They’re now doing more on safety orientation. The legal offices in the universities and school oversight committees are asking tougher questions, instead of just letting a professor take off with 15 students.”

    But without mandatory minimum standards, there is little that can be done to police the industry.

Pressure to expand

    The potential for disaster may only increase as the number of students rises. In May, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley called for a doubling of the number of Americans studying overseas. President Clinton issued an executive order directing the Education and State departments to increase funding for scholarships for study abroad.

    Doubling the students overseas is likely to increase the safety gap between established programs and those feeling their way. “You’re not going to double the number of people dealing with study abroad who have adequate training and background to do it properly,” Bradley said.

    “There is a learning curve for institutions getting into the field,” said Michael Vande Berg, dean of the School for International Training in Vermont, and former head of the program at Michigan State University.

    “The question is, what is the proper amount of support to students?” Vande Berg said. “They are accustomed to having these safety nets. Sending them abroad, they don’t have them.