I found this topic to be pertinant to the Orphanage Crisis topic, as one of the Orphanages I’ve been looking into (will post on it soon) had many volunteers who were students studying abroad. https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/1998441

This article however, describes dangers to the volunteers themselves, the growth of a booming travel and study abroad industry which, IMO, holds great potential for indirectly contributing to international money laundering, human trafficking, the sudden explosion in the number of Orphanages catering to foreign “VolunTourists”, (using children who are not Orphans), and some institutions which neglect the children, allowing volunteers to pay for essentials and repairs. (As well as other forms of child exploitation).

It’s not common knowledge that:

“Many American universities and colleges find it too expensive or difficult to manage such programs. Instead, they refer students to independent, third-party operators such as the Institute for the International Education of Students, the Council on International Educational Exchange or Semester at Sea.” “These independent program operators are not authorized to give college credits. So they partner with accredited institutions, often different from the school where the student is enrolled.”

One parent, Ros Thackurdeen, who lost her son Ravi to drowning in Costa Rica in 2012, calls the setup duplicitous.

“These universities offer these programs as if it’s theirs,” she said.

Nineteen-year-old Ravi had been studying chemistry and pre-med at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, but his tropical medicine course in Costa Rica was being accredited through Duke University. “They give you a sense that they have done their due diligence,” she said.

(paraphrased) ...Elizabeth Brenner, whose son died the previous year, while on a study abroad program offered by the Organization of Tropical Studies, had sought answers regarding his death in 2011. Thomas Plotkin slipped and fell more than 300 feet down a steep gorge and into the raging Goriganga river; his body was never recovered. When she “began looking into how many other students died overseas, and who might be keeping track of the deaths…“The answer was that nobody was keeping track of this at all”.

At least 1,000 American universities and colleges currently offer credit for studying overseas, up from 700 a decade ago, according to the Institute of International Education. In addition, “many campuses with fewer than 10 students studying abroad aren’t on the list”, institute spokeswoman Sharon Witherell said.

American students studying abroad each year on university-sponsored programs has doubled in the last decade (millions of students) …”part of a growing global youth travel industry estimated to be worth $183 billion a year.” Unlike deaths on U.S. college and university campuses, which are required to be disclosed, data on deaths that occur abroad are not disclosed or even kept track of… “data collected by industry organizations are incomplete.”

“Most student deaths or injuries overseas are only briefly discussed or mentioned in local newspaper reports. The U.S. Department of Education keeps no such statistics.”

Ravi’s mother went on a quest…“I began searching the internet,” Thackurdeen said. Within five years, she amassed seven binders of newspaper articles and travel alerts counting 3,200 other students who had died or been kidnapped, drugged, injured or assaulted abroad over the last few decades.

For 2014, she counted 14 student deaths — far higher than the four listed by the Forum on Education Abroad among the nearly 150,000 students it was able to track that year. The forum calculated a mortality rate of 13.5 per 100,000 from those four deaths in an effort to compare on-campus deaths with those during study-abroad programs, which often last less than a full school year.

Forum on Education Abroad has attempted to gather such data for 2014 from two insurance companies, which together cover half of the U.S. study-abroad market, using the partial data from only one year to argue in a 2016 report that students are less likely to die overseas than on a U.S. campus. The Forum on Education Abroad has since expanded its study to cover the five-year period from 2010 to 2015, and will be releasing a new report in the fall, still using only half the number of students studying abroad.

Brenner and other parents slammed the report , saying the findings are misleading because a full half of the study-abroad market was ignored, giving parents the idea that programs are safer than they may actually be.

“What I discovered about study-abroad safety was disturbing,” Thackurdeen said from her home in Newburgh, New York. “The numbers of incidents and deaths on study abroad are overwhelming.”

(Thought: is it possible there are areas that are too hazardous for the two insurance companies to cover?)

“Knowing which areas are hotspots for violent crime is important information for kids and parents to know when they’re making decisions on where they’ll study abroad,” said Rep. Sean Maloney, a Democrat from New York, who first introduced the Ravi Thackurdeen Safe Students Study Abroad Act in Congress in 2014. The bill failed to pass in the Republican-led House of Representatives, and Maloney plans to reintroduce it in September.

Last year, new federal legislation was introduced by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican, to make studying abroad an integral part of higher education by creating more university grants and incentives. The goal of the bill is to increase the number of Americans studying overseas to 1 million a year.