Circling the world for three months on an ocean liner while earning a semester's worth of college credits has been a life-changing adventure for thousands of students who have joined the University of Pittsburgh's Semester at Sea program.

But a recent handful of accidental deaths has some Southern California parents contending that the experience should come with a warning label.

For Gordon and Dona Crawford of La Canada Flintridge, the pain of their son Brett's death in a hiking accident while on the program in 1993 came back in March.

That was when five Semester at Sea participants--one from Long Beach and another from the San Diego area--were killed in a bus crash during the ship's visit to India.

"Losing a child is a uniquely painful experience. As I was lying in bed the night I heard about this year's accident, I knew that a series of parents was embarking on that same horrible experience," said Gordon Crawford, a financial executive.

By stopping in places such as Sri Lanka, Turkey, Morocco, Israel and South Africa, Semester at Sea allows students to see more countries and visit more remote locales than most study-abroad courses. It is one of the largest study-abroad programs and one of only a handful that takes students to more than one country.

Gordon Crawford acknowledges that "my son caused his own death; they didn't cause it."

But he asks: "Is it wise to take [hundreds of] kids who still think they're indestructible and drop them off on their own in dangerous places?"

Semester at Sea officials say the program's rewards far outweigh its risks and note that more than 25,000 students have been on the voyages.

"These things don't happen every semester. We've never had an incident like the one in India," said John P. Tymitz, director of the Institute for Shipboard Education, a nonprofit organization that administers the program.

Some parents of students who died this year said they were unaware of previous student deaths and that it never occurred to them to ask.

"I thought that certainly, because of the length of time it had been operating, that they would have every one of their safety ducks in a row," said Charles Schewe, a University of Massachusetts professor whose daughter Sara, a Georgetown University junior, was among the four students and one adult participant killed in India on a bus expedition sponsored by the program.