Like similar tragedies at home, many involve drinking and drugs. No matter the locale, he says, fights, traffic accidents and sexual assaults can almost always be traced to alcohol. The manuals used by program supervisors are clear on drugs. But until March 1996, Semester at Sea had not experienced a death on a shoreside program it supervised. Given the numbers of students it has escorted around the world and the propensity for young people to take risks, its safety record, by any measure, is good.
Life inherently carries risk.
How much risk, however, is hard to say. A lot of time universities won't disclose what's going on. They're afraid it will taint their reputations. Even now, the study abroad establishment is at odds over how much prospective students should be told about past troubles. Despite this panoply of problems, no one, not the industry's harshest critics, not even the families of the victims of tragedies, want study abroad shut down.