Study Abroad Health and Safety Advisories Amid Geopolitical Conflicts: What Universities Need to Know

My first pre-departure safety briefing involved a laminated card with emergency numbers and a shared delusion that nobody would ever need them. That was years ago. The card is now an app, the delusion survived, and university study abroad offices are once again learning the same lesson: the hardest call is not whether a country is safe. It is whether the people making the decision can defend it to a parent at 9 p.m. on a Friday.

Geopolitical conflicts have made that question routine. The U.S. State Department's four-tier travel advisory system is the starting point for most American universities, but almost no institution treats it as the finish line. Some suspend travel at Level 3, others at Level 4, a few make exceptions for locations an hour's drive from the danger zone, and a handful redesign the program rather than cancel it. Fairness demands saying it plainly: a kilometre or a checkpoint can change the risk more than the colour of a government map.

Try explaining to a physics professor that his spring field course in Jordan is cancelled because of a State Department Level 3 advisory covering a country he has visited safely for a decade. I have been in that meeting. It did not go well. The professor had a point. The advisory covered areas hundreds of miles from Amman, and his course had local partners who knew the roads better than the U.S. government did. The university's policy, however, did not distinguish between Amman and the border. That is not a flaw in the policy; it is a feature. A blanket rule protects the institution from being the one making granular security judgments. A targeted exception transfers that judgment to a committee that may not have slept near the border recently.

Nobody tells you that risk committees spend more time on insurance clauses than on intelligence briefings. The first question is usually not 'is the student safe?' but 'will our general liability policy still cover medical evacuation if the State Department says Level 4?' That sounds cold. It also happens to be the question that keeps programs running or shuts them down. Universities buy medical and security evacuation coverage for students and faculty. Some policies exclude countries with Level 4 advisories. If the university sends a student there anyway, the evacuation claim may be denied, the family may sue, and the institution's risk officer will be asked why the policy was ignored. The advisory is public; the insurance exclusion is private. The former makes the news. The latter makes the decision.

The health part of the equation is less dramatic and more expensive

People imagine geopolitical risk as an explosion, but the more common cost is an interrupted prescription. A student on a semester in a city that suddenly loses access to a specialty pharmacy is not in a war zone, yet the semester collapses anyway. My own first study abroad student needed a monthly biologic infusion; the nearest clinic that could administer it was a six-hour flight away. That was before drones and border closures, and the lesson stuck: health infrastructure is a security issue. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains country-specific travel health notices that universities check alongside State Department warnings. In conflict-adjacent regions, hospitals may run short of routine medicines, water systems may fail, and chronic disease clinics may close with little notice. A university that reviews only security advisories has solved half the problem.

Medical evacuation is the unglamorous sticker shock. The bill for an air ambulance from a remote location can exceed six figures, and university policies differ on who pays. The University of California Education Abroad Program requires students to maintain specific medical evacuation and repatriation coverage. Other universities bundle evacuation insurance into program fees. Still others treat it as a line item a student can decline, which is a bit like declining the fire extinguisher on a boat. My recommendation is simpler than any policy manual: never let a student opt out of medical evacuation coverage. The cost is small; the alternative is a fundraising page.

Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash

How risk committees actually decide

Most universities run some version of a standing risk assessment group. It usually includes the study abroad director, general counsel, a campus safety officer, an insurance broker, the dean of students or international office, and a faculty member from a relevant area. The chair is often the person least likely to travel. Nobody plans it that way. The committee reviews a bundle: State Department and FCDO guidance, insurance carrier positions, on-the-ground reports from partners, and—if they are smart—a WhatsApp thread from a faculty director who was there last Tuesday. The decision options are not just 'go' and 'no go.' They include: move the cohort to a different city, shorten the program, shift to remote coursework, accept a smaller group with enhanced security, or keep the program but end any travel outside the host city.

The Forum on Education Abroad's Standards of Good Practice require member organizations to conduct routine, documented risk assessments and to communicate health, safety, and security information to students. I have sat through assessments that were neither routine nor documented. They were reactive, emotional, and written on a whiteboard. The standards matter because they give a university something to point to when a program is challenged. The legal pressure is not hypothetical: earlier reporting on international student visa revocations and legal challenges showed how quickly individual status disputes force institutions to build a documentary trail. Health and safety decisions are no different. A risk committee that writes down nothing has decided nothing.

Students and families push back, and sometimes they should

When a university suspends a program, students do not quietly accept the refund. Some appeal because they have structured an entire degree around fieldwork; others because their host family is waiting, or their scholarship disappears if they defer. A few appeal for a reason administrators forget: their own risk tolerance is higher than the committee's, and they are adults. The legal doctrine of in loco parentis stopped being a complete defence around the time universities started letting 19-year-olds choose their own roommates. But universities still carry a duty of care. That duty is not to eliminate risk—it is to act as a reasonably prudent institution. The difference between those two things is the entire job.

I once called a student's mother to tell her we were bringing her daughter home early from a conflict-adjacent site. She asked whether the daughter wanted to come home. I said no. She asked whose safety the decision was for. The honest answer was that it was for the institution's, partly. That conversation taught me more than any risk manual. In 2026, students and families compare notes across programs on WhatsApp groups and Reddit. They know that one university suspended its Israel program while another kept its Egypt program running. Consistency is impossible when local conditions differ; transparency is not. The best offices publish their decision criteria and keep the rationale in plain English, not in risk-committee jargon.

The financial side of suspension is less obvious than tuition refunds

When a university cancels a program three weeks before departure, the tuition refund is the easy part. The harder costs are unrecoverable: housing deposits paid to a landlord in a city under evacuation orders, airline tickets bought outside university channels, a student's non-refundable visa fee, and the prepaid mobile plan that stops working at the border. Some universities reimburse pre-approved expenses; others rely on trip-cancellation coverage with conflict exclusions. My least favourite moment as a study abroad administrator was telling a student that her travel insurance would not cover cancellation because the conflict had been 'foreseeable' at the time she bought the policy. The word foreseeable does a lot of silent work in insurance contracts.

Session after session, administrators are also watching budget pressure. The decision to suspend a program does not end the hosting costs: staff abroad may still need pay, leases may still run, and partner universities may still expect their share. Public institutions in several countries have had to ask state or federal governments for help covering stranded-program costs. The less visible expense is the opportunity cost. If a university cancels one program, it rarely gets to redirect that student to a cheaper one at no charge—the student's financial aid year has already been planned.

Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash

What administrators should do before the next escalation

A practical list, because I have made the mistakes myself:

• Require every student to enrol in the U.S. State Department's Smart Traveler Enrollment Program, which goes by the unfortunate acronym STEP (translation: the embassy now knows you exist).
• Pre-book emergency medical evacuation benefits rather than reimbursing after the fact. Read the exclusion list first. That last sentence should be taped to the risk officer's monitor.
• Test the communication tree twice a year, once at 3 a.m. for the administrator who thinks the system works. It usually doesn't.
• Decide in advance which partner institutions you will trust for real-time security information. A partner that answers emails once a week is not a safety partner.
• Document every decision the day it is made. A whiteboard counts as documentation only if you photograph it, and even that is generous.

The next geopolitical conflict will not wait for the beginning of an academic term. It will happen mid-semester, on a Saturday, while the study abroad director is at a wedding. The institutions that survive it are the ones whose default action is already written down. The rest will spend Monday morning arguing about a laminated card that nobody can find.