Nearly six years after her son slipped and fell around 100 meters (yards) into a raging mountain river in India, never to be seen again, Elizabeth Brenner is still wondering how such an accident could have happened.
Brenner's son, Thomas Plotkin, was one of the millions of American students who have studied abroad on university-sponsored programs in the last decade — part of a growing global youth travel industry estimated to be worth $183 billion a year.
He wanted to experience another culture, "unlike anything that he'd ever known," Brenner said.
Others want to study a new language or learn about different political systems. Universities generally encourage study abroad because they believe it improves leadership skills and employment prospects.
When her son died, Brenner 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," she said.
The number of American students studying abroad each year 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 data collected by industry organizations are incomplete.
More than 313,400 American students earned academic credit for studying abroad in 2014-15, according to the Institute of International Education, which creates study-abroad programs and manages U.S. government study-abroad scholarships.
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.
A group called the 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. The group — with about 100 study-abroad companies and 570 schools as members — used 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, and "to understand more about the student experience, so that programs can be improved and risk can be mitigated," its chief, Brian Whalen, told The Associated Press.
It calculated a mortality rate of 13.5 deaths for every 100,000 college students studying abroad, versus 29.4 deaths on campus, to argue that studying overseas was actually safer.
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.
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. A preliminary analysis of that report was presented in June and showed a mortality rate for college students studying abroad of 18.1 deaths per 100,000. However, the report will still cover only half the number of students studying abroad.
Whalen said his group tried to get the exact number of student deaths overseas from the U.S. State Department, but it was not available.
Ros Thackurdeen hasn't been able to sleep through the night since her youngest son, Ravi, drowned while on a school-sponsored excursion to a beach in Costa Rica in 2012.
"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.
"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."
She and other grieving mothers began demanding more transparency about what happens when students go overseas.