Truth be told, I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I signed up to study abroad this past summer.
I didn’t check for travel warnings, and reading the safety guidelines provided by the study abroad office only caused me stress. I barely checked the weather abroad as I packed my bags.
And I don’t think I was alone in not reading the endless volumes of informational material. Students often depart the country underprepared, which could leave them vulnerable in dangerous or compromising situations abroad.
Last month, after being contacted by a family whose son drowned in 2012 on a study abroad trip in Costa Rica, several senators called on the U.S. Department of Education to adopt enhanced safety guidelines for students studying abroad, namely by dispensing more information about overseas safety and security concerns to students and families.
But such data only serves to direct students away from dangerous situations and cannot be seen as an end-all solution to study abroad safety. Simply feeding students safety information that many are likely to overlook or neglect is different from actually demonstrating how to best handle unsafe situations in the case that they do happen abroad.
Given that study abroad programs involve the collaboration of schools from various countries, each with its own set of procedures and rules, colleges across the nation should certainly get their safety standards on the same page. But dispensing more health and safety information about the countries abroad is only half of the safety equation. Study abroad offices should supplement this data-driven safety education with a drive for implementing hands-on safety practices at host colleges and programs overseas.
To its credit, the University of California Education Abroad Program already practices thorough safety precautions without mandates from the government. UCEAP generally does not operate programs in countries with active U.S. Department of State travel warnings unless considered safe by the Regional Security Office in the U.S. Embassy, said Ines DeRomana, director of health, safety and emergency response at UCEAP, in an email statement. It also provides heaps of informational documents regarding safety abroad about insurance, dress codes, traffic and even contingency plans in the case of program suspension or evacuation.
Given UCEAP’s self-policed safety standards, the suggestions from senators do not take it far enough. Some specific actions they propose include merely providing information about country-specific safety concerns and encouraging more students to enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program, which allows the U.S. Embassy to send U.S. citizens alerts about safety conditions in their countries of travel, as well as to contact them during emergencies.
The senators also recommend matching safety guidelines for K-12 and postsecondary study abroad programs with those of U.S. State Department-sponsored programs by restricting travel to areas with active travel warnings for concerns like climate or civil unrest. Meanwhile, Minnesota now requires study abroad programs offered by or approved for credit by their state colleges to publicly report student deaths, accidents and injuries.
These guidelines are all reasonable enough, if not obvious. But they do not provide the kind of hands-on experience that could help students react quickly and appropriately in a dangerous situation.
For me, missing a single e-mail message meant missing the pre-departure orientation before my own UCEAP trip. And the countless pages of information on the UCEAP website, no matter how organized, did little to reassure me that I would remember what to do in the case of a safety emergency.
What did stick with me, though, was the on-site and active orientation on the other side of the world – the in-person fire drill on the first day, not the vague “In Case of a Fire” placard I noticed hanging in my dorm room weeks after my classmates already experienced waking to fire alarms.
If the legislative push for more safety information continues, study abroad programs cannot lose sight of safety training as an equally important part of safety education. For all of the informational warnings sent out about rowdy demonstrations or minding cultural cues, there will always be several students who wind up in dangerous scenarios anyway.
Students planning to study abroad need demonstration of what to do in those situations, not just a warning to avoid the situations altogether. In these cases, far away from home, all of the safety information our parents received won’t be of any help to us.
After all, researching and reading safety information about countries abroad is ultimately an individual responsibility. What is out of our hands is getting training about procedures and security on specific campuses and locations abroad – things as specific as how to use a fire extinguisher on a host campus in another country or how to best contact a local police department.
When it comes to a real-life experience like studying abroad, programs cannot guarantee safety just by providing numbers.