Rise in student concern about safety while studying abroad

By Yojana Sharma. As international student mobility grows, the number of reported attacks on students has also been increasing and students are becoming more aware of the risks they may face when studying abroad.
The issue of personal safety has risen sharply in importance for international students when considering where to study, from just 17 out of 19 listed factors they had to consider five years ago to fifth position in 2012, according to a longitudinal study of some 160,000 students carried out by the British Council’s Education Intelligence unit.
The data signal a significant shift in attitudes, said a just-released Student Insight report, The Rise in Global Student Safety Concerns.
In 2007, perceptions about whether a study-abroad destination was a safe country was near bottom of the list of student concerns, but a year later safety shot to ninth, seventh in 2009 and fifth in the past three years.