Today’s college students will be living and working in a world where people from different countries and cultures increasingly interact and rely on one another. School trips abroad and foreign study programs play a valuable role in preparing American young people for the global society that awaits them.
But that doesn’t justify badly planned excursions that put students at unnecessary risk.
Whether that was the case when officials at St. Mary’s College in Maryland authorized a study trip to Guatemala is still not clear. The college president and a professor who helped organize the trip have maintained that the 13 students who took part were fully informed ahead of time of the possible risks and that reasonable steps were taken to keep them safe during the winter-break stay in Guatemala.
The excursion took place despite State Department warnings that other groups of American tourists had been subjected to brutal daytime assaults while traveling in that crime-ridden Central American country. Near the end of the trip, five St. Mary’s students were raped when armed robbers ambushed their bus on a particularly dangerous stretch of road in southern Guatemala.
The terrifying ordeal of the St. Mary’s students was a tragedy. But it would also be a tragedy if this one ill-fated excursion caused other schools to cut back on their commitment to foreign travel and study. If that happened, many young people would never get the chance to discover not only fascinating new places but also exciting career and lifestyle options they might never have stumbled upon back home.
Instead, university and college officials should react by thoroughly re-examining their foreign programs to guarantee they are as safe as possible. And when trips to undeniably dangerous locales are nevertheless deemed worth the risk because of the unique educational opportunities they afford, then school officials must be certain that students and their parents fully appreciate all the potential problems involved.
Unless students and parents have confidence in school personnel who organize and conduct foreign travel, the appeal of these valuable programs will decline. That can’t be allowed to happen.
