NEW DELHI — When Elizabeth Brenner’s 21-year-old son died while hiking during a study-abroad trip in India, she began searching for other cases and found only partial data and anecdotal records.
“Nobody was keeping track of this at all,” she said.
Brenner’s son, Thomas Plotkin, was one of the millions of American students who have studied abroad in the last decade — part of a growing global youth travel industry estimated to be worth $183 billion a year.
The number of American students studying abroad has doubled in the last decade. But while U.S. colleges and universities must report deaths on their campuses, they are not required to disclose most student deaths that occur abroad and the U.S. Department of Education keeps no such statistics.
A group called the Forum on Education Abroad pulled together information for 2014 from two insurance companies that together cover half of the U.S. study-abroad market. The group used the partial data to conclude in a 2016 report that students are less likely to die overseas than on a U.S. campus.
Brenner and other parents slammed the report, saying the findings are misleading and give parents the idea that programs are safer than they may actually be.
The forum is now planning to release a new report later this year with information for 2010-15, but it will still cover only half of the market. The forum’s head, Brian Whalen, said they tried to get the exact number of student deaths overseas from the U.S. State Department, but were told it wasn’t available.
