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The Student-Blaming Has Begun
- m0zg 6y agoReminder: the vast, vast majority of the students are not in danger of dying. Median age of those dying is ~80, and CFR drops off exponentially for younger people to almost nothing. They're also going to do stupid shit anyway. So maybe it's better if they stayed in dormitories rather than visited their grandma from time to time.
- michaericalribo 6y agoStudents are only one group of people who use a campus...people are less concerned about kids doing dumb shit that hurts them, and more worried about kids doing dumb shit that jeopardizes the safety of faculty, administrators, facilities staff, poor students who get a decent meal when they’re on campus bc of financial aid...part of the entire problem here is the narrow perspective that ‘students’ are the only ones worth considering when making public health decisions around universities.
- m0zg 6y agoMost of the "administrators" can work from home, or in fact be laid off outright. The quality of education will only improve, and cost would decrease. Older professors could social distance and wear PPE if they are so inclined. I think charging $40-50K/yr for a glorified MOOC is ridiculous.
- rendall 6y agoAnnoyingly, I cannot read the article, with the demands to sign up, undismissable modals, "ad blocker detected" pop up (I don't have an ad blocker on mobile).
- dang 6y ago"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- neonate 6y agohttps://outline.com/Sx7fWP https://outline.com/Sx7fWP
- neonate 6y agohttps://outline.com/Sx7fWP https://outline.com/Sx7fWP
- rendall 6y agoThank you!
- jamestimmins 6y agoWhen did we adopt the mentality that students first and foremost deserve "the college experience" and therefore can't be expected to follow safe guidelines? We can empathize with students and the realistic boredom and disappointment that comes with social distancing while in college. But at the same time, these are adults, often enormously privileged. The thing about hard times is that they often require sacrifice and re-examining our expectation of what we deserve. Obviously Covid-19 represents systemic failure, and there's an argument to be made that colleges shouldn't be bringing students back in the first place. But the infantilization of young adults is absurd.
- xcasperx 6y agoStudent deserve the college experience as that's what they pay for. Some students pay a lot of money to go to a university that has brand recognition, others pay a lot of money to go to a school that's known to be a great party school. If you're 18, going to one of the latter schools, and you look at the statistics of death rates for each age group, you're definitely going to go and party. I think asking an 18 year old who's thinking, "well I'm still paying this much and everyone else got to do it" to recognize the sacrifice is an extremely high bar to ask of them
- Alekhine 6y agoI'm a college student on a gap year. I actually appreciate you saying this, but sadly, you have gravely overestimated the ability of college students, especially freshmen, to follow guidelines.
- mehrdadn 6y agoI feel like they have the ability but not the motivation and/or willpower. Obviously lots of factors probably affect it (I mentioned one in another one of my comments), but I'd be curious if e.g. a college student of the same age in (say) Germany would be just as unable to follow guidelines as one in the US.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoCollege students regularly break safety guidelines. They climb on roofs where they're not allowed, try random sketchy drugs, drink to extreme excess, and have crowded unsanctioned parties. A few schools correctly anticipated this, and have simply banned students from leaving their dorms for the first 2 weeks of the term. So it's very difficult for me not to infer bad faith from administrators who said "pinky swear not to party?" and now act shocked there were parties.
- ashtonkem 6y agoThe administrators want to have their cake and eat it, several ways over. They want college students to return, at least for a bit, to justify charging for room and board. They also want the root cause of any “okay, everyone go home” orders to be the students themselves, to better justify keeping all that room and board money. But they also desperately want to avoid any awkward questions about why they didn’t see this coming. It’s really hard for the casual observer to not wonder if the administrators are just plain stupid.
- mehrdadn 6y agoI wonder how many of these problems are severely exacerbated by the high price tags for college education. Especially amidst the pandemic. It seems obvious that when people pay more, they become less flexible on the results they find acceptable.
- birdyrooster 6y agoGood. People need to be held accountable.
- spideymans 6y agoThe blame for this lies solely with those with the political and institutional power to have mitigated the impacts of this global pandemic. If not for their reckless inaction we would not be in this position in the first place. Any talk of blaming teens and twenty-somethings for this is nothing more than a deflection.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWhat’s particularly galling is that some of the people attempting to blame the students are most familiar with how students behave.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MattGaiser 6y agoYou don’t get a pass for bad behaviour because you have a long history of bad behaviour.
- ashtonkem 6y agoCollege age kids have exhibited poor behavior since ... forever? You can rage against this, or you can design systems designed to function despite the poor risk/reward calculations of some people. Only one actually gets results, the other just lets you shift blame.
- true_religion 6y agoThese students don't have a history of bad behavior, they have no history at all because it's their first time living alone, and making such decisions for themselves. We know that people often make mistakes when they lack experience, it's our responsibility to ensure those mistakes don't lead to catastrophic loss merely because you graduated high school in the wrong year.
- viraptor 6y agoThere's a bit of generalising here. This is not "how students behave". This is "how people who really want social gatherings and in person parties behave" regardless if they're students or not. The idea that you can't tell an adult they have to wear masks in a certain environment is silly. Or to put it in a different way, if the students stayed at home, specific rules would apply to them. There's no reason they shouldn't apply on the campus as well. They're paying for college, not for a right to party.
- mgraczyk 6y agoIt really bothers me that the college administrators are so misaligned with their students. Their core focus should be on safely providing value to the students. IMO rather than reacting with condemnation and threats, Syracuse should have reacted by facilitating the development of safe social norms, placing tables in X patterns outside and telling students that they are free to gather but have to remain on opposite sides of the tables. People often do this naturally anyway and it would be sufficient to enforce safe distancing.
- admiral33 6y agoGood strategy. It's easy to sit in a high chair and look down on college students while working from home. In reality the students that stringently follow their University's health and safety strategy this year will be in a mentally distressing situation. Curfew - dorm room isolation - omniscient professors (attendance and participation). The whole country watching you with shameful eyes. Imagine being a young adult who has no real place in the world yet - learning from everyone in your life that you should work hard so you can go to college and have a shot at carving one out for yourself - and the moment you arrive our culture flips the script and calls you a murderer for going.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoIt’s very annoying that this site drops a big banner forcing you to create an account to read it. Who do they think they are that their written content is supposed to be so can’t-miss that I’m going to slap together yet another data breach liability-waiting-to-happen user account, let alone letting them track my personal data, just to read this. The arrogance and user hostility is severe. Of course they are allowed to try this, they don’t owe me anything at all, and they (rightly) are wanting to monetize the publication of content they spent time and money to produce. All that is irrelevant. They (and many other sites doing this) need a serious wake up call to be more self-aware that random long tail content on the internet is worth approximately zilch, and the cost of registering and giving you my data is way too high for something like this.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoI hate this concept that blaming these young adults for being irresponsible is wrong because we should have know the students would be irresponsible. Sure, it’s predictable, but that does zero to absolve the students. It just means that the admins are to blame also. They’re clearly hoping that holding rule breakers accountable will lead to other students rising to the challenge. It’s obvious that, before you punish/suspend/expel a bunch of them, they’ll act as normal. It remains to be seen what they’ll do afterwards.
- lmilcin 6y agoHere in Poland it seems nobody is truly enforcing this. Technically, you cannot enter anything without masks but neither employees nor patrons will react. Most people also wears their masks without covering their nose which shows how much attention they are paying to the whole thing -- the masks are only there to avoid a hefty fine. In this situation it is difficult to blame students. Young people have innate tendency to ignore orders and if "full" adults (I don't really like the term...) cannot show united front on somethnig then youngsters certainly won't.
- danaris 6y agoI can't speak for the general case, but in the case of the small university I work at, a huge reason the student body is so irresponsible is that the administration is well-known to turn a blind eye to whole rafts of terrible behaviours (some of which are blatantly illegal, others merely really bad ideas). If you've been demonstrating for the past 80 years that students who put on unsanctioned parties, put racist graffiti on their neighbours' whiteboards, and have suitcases full of heroin in their dorm rooms won't be punished in any way, why should they believe that now you're going to punish them for...putting on unsanctioned parties?
- MattGaiser 6y agoAsking universities to police student behaviour in any form beyond academic/on sanctioned trips is absurd. If gatherings need to be banned, police should enforce the ban on gatherings. Universities exist to instruct and learn, not be substitute parents.
- gwbas1c 6y agoIt's not just students. A few weeks ago, I showed up a family member's house for a gathering. I thought it was going to be about 15 people, outside, with masks and plenty of distance. Instead, it was a party, with all ages. Tables from a catering company were close together. My elderly aunts and uncles from both sides of my family were there. I left immediately. Fortunately, no one's come down with Covid-19. Given that many people at the party were elderly, if Covid-19 was there, it wouldn't have ended well.
- mauvehaus 6y agoPart of the hard reality of this is that colleges often depend on room and board revenue to stay solvent, particularly smaller schools[0][1]. This would seem to heavily incentivize bringing students back so as to collect this money. When things (predictably) go to shit, it's easier for the administrations to blame the students than it is to blame the perilous finances that made it all but required to try to bring the students back so they could collect that money. [0] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/900782472/as-pandemic-hits-colleges-finances-small-town-may-be-affected-too https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/900782472/as-pandemic-hits-co... [1] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/05/13/coronavirus-small-college-closures https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/05/13/coronavirus-small...
- ip26 6y agoAdministrators need to design good policy, of course. But the fundamental implicit assumption here seems to be "Students are not adults"
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIt's not about whether or not they're adults; it's about whether they're willing to follow public health guidance about large gatherings. Many older adults throughout the country are similarly unwilling.
- ip26 6y agoSimilarly unwilling, yet we don't give them a free pass for it.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI'd argue we do. In most areas of the country formal citations for violating social distancing measures are extremely rare; we occasionally crack down on the most blatant excesses, but generally just accept that some people are gonna have large parties or large protests.