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When 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

• xcasperx 6y ago
  Student 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 ago
  I'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 ago
    I 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]
  • KiranRao0 6y ago
    If you don't mind sharing, what is it like being on a gap year during the times of COVID?
    • Alekhine 6y ago
      Pretty boring, I must say. Staying inside may drive some people crazy, but it suits me just fine. I have plenty of hobbies to keep me busy. Most of my time and energy is spent on work and I have a reading list so I can actually acquire some education over the course of the coming year myself. In the fall I plan on getting an IT job, so I'm glad this year has given me the chance to get some experience in technical work.
• csense 6y ago
  University education is basically an economic transaction. The student pays $X to get Y, where Y is certain learning and social experiences, plus a valuable credential, with a certain level of safety and protection. Due to COVID-19, the university is no longer able to provide the same learning and social experiences with the same level of safety. This isn't the fault of anybody involved in the transaction, neither students nor university could have prevented COVID-19. Here are the options: - (a) Cancel or postpone the transaction. Students get their money back, the school is freed from providing their now-impossible obligation. Perhaps they are allowed to re-enroll when COVID-19 is under control again, without penalty to admission status or scholarship dollars. - (b) Lessen the obligation. Students continue to pay and attend, but get less effective social and educational experiences, and more restrictive safety rules, due to COVID-19. - (c) Ignore safety. Continue to operate as always, recognizing that a large number of students, faculty and administrators will sicken, and a smaller number will die. People have mostly decided on option (b). Option (c) is a non-starter for parents and administrators, but a large subset of students is probably quite willing to take personal risks. Nobody seems to want to discuss option (a), perhaps because it will destroy higher education's finances and force some institutions out of business entirely without massive external support.
  • DuskStar 6y ago
    Another note against C is that while very few students will die (~12 at a 40,000 student campus if they all get it and it has an IFR of 0.03% for people 18-25, ~2 if the IFR is closer to 0.01% and half the students get it - either way comparable to the normal number of student deaths. The chance that a 20 year old American dies in the next year is around 0.1%, after all), administrators/professors are older and thus at greatly increased risk.
  • willcipriano 6y ago
    I see a D option. Reduce the costs to the students to reflect the market price of the services rendered. While the pandemic isn't the fault of the colleges, the nature of operating a business is you can only charge for services you are able to deliver. Find a comparable online school, that's what you can charge.
• JadeNB 6y ago
  > When did we adopt the mentality that students first and foremost deserve "the college experience" and therefore can't be expected to follow safe guidelines? There are a lot of things that can be expected in the sense of thinking that they ought to happen; but thinking that they will happen is another matter. Pretending that students, if sent lots of scolding e-mails and forced to sign pledges, will suddenly become models of social responsibility—in a way that, in many places, their 'adult' peers have not been able to do—is just a juvenile trick by college administrators to try to shift the burden of blame from themselves: parents forced them to open their campuses when it wasn't safe; students forced them to close their campuses by making it unsafe. Both of these statements are, in their ways, true, but intentionally lost in the mix is the fact that the one body that is sucking out huge quantities of money from students and parents is somehow managing to pretend that it bears no responsibility, and is just the helpless pawn of its customers (and I do use 'customers' advisedly, our university's administration having stated that student safety was a priority and faculty safety was not, since we don't pay tuition).
• unix_fan 6y ago
  As a recent highschool graduate, it is rather Unfortunate that many of my classmates seem to lack personal responsibility in the face of this pandemic. Worse, parents and older adults are freely enabling it.
  • claudeganon 6y ago
    No amount of “personal responsibility” is going to prevent an otherwise unchecked pandemic from further spreading where you have large numbers of young people clustered in housing and classes. This isn’t a problem of individual virtue, it’s an institutional failure across many levels that’s being blamed on its victims.
  • spideymans 6y ago
    It's no surprise that a bunch of 18 year olds and twenty-somethings aren't particularly responsible. The leaders that decided to open these schools, largely for financial reasons, were undoubtedly aware that this would be the outcome.
  • tjs8rj 6y ago
    I disagree that it is evidence of some "lacking of personal responsibility". There are many concerns here from the health of the elderly to the potential unknown long-term effects of Covid-19, and so on. Another is the potentially long-term effects economically on the new entrants to the job market due to shutdowns. We've seen the devastating effects and setbacks faced by millennials unfortunate enough to graduate during the Great Recession and found very few jobs in their fields. In other words, it's an important consideration: should the graduates and new entrants NOW, who are otherwise healthy adults capable of making their own risk assessments and caring for themselves, be by all means harshly economically impacted to ensure the safety of much older generations? Why can't we implement a scenario where the elderly are the ones locked inside with a check slid under their door while the rest of the world continues? What we currently have seems incredibly regressive: relatively well-off older generations holding the rest of the country hostage while the relatively poorer (and much less at risk) younger generations take the blow that may set them back for years or more. I recognize that this is a very nuanced topic, and I didn't give nearly enough detail and information here to really lay out a fully equipped argument, but the point stands: there are more costs here than just the disease, and they may be more grave than the debate seems to mention.
• claudeganon 6y ago
  The people running colleges know entirely that opening will lead to outbreaks, but have decided they can collect in-person tuition with safety theater, switch to virtual classes when the outbreaks emerge, and then blame the students. Virtual classes are a bad deal at that price? So sorry, you should’ve behaved better! It’s a bad faith, bait and switch that puts lives at risk so the bloated administrations of these universities can continue collecting paychecks. Even professors recognize this and are protesting the reopenings across the country.
  • spideymans 6y ago
    I hate analogies... but this is like the prison warden intentionally leaving the gates to the prison wide open, and then absolving themselves of all responsibility when the prisoners inevitably escape by saying, "well, the prisoners oughta have known not to escape". No, you knew what you were doing and what the consequences would be.
• bradleyjg 6y ago
  > The thing about hard times is that they often require sacrifice and re-examining our expectation of what we deserve. The funny thing about the calls for sacrifice is that all too often they are a call for someone else to sacrifice. Are the senior employees of the universities, who run them as profit maximizing partnerships notwithstanding nominal non-profit status, taking pay and benefit cuts?
  • ip26 6y ago
    I see what you are saying- but there's a selection bias here. When you sacrifice, do you first write a news article calling on yourself to sacrifice?
    • 8bitsrule 6y ago
      If I were a person who'd spent 6 years getting a PhD, and 25 years doing research, I'd be very reluctant to expose myself to a group of youngsters who 'needed' to party, despite the much-more-substantial risk I was taking to help their futures. Just the other day I heard of the 'surprise' Covid death of a 30-year-old high-school coach. Covid is an equal-opportunity destroyer and age-discriminator. If the kids won't play it safe, then they're deliberately ignoring that they're playing with other people's lives. Suspension is too good for them ... send them home with an invitation to come back in a few years, if they're still alive and have the money.
• TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Full-grown adults have proven unable to follow safe guidelines. How are you expecting a bunch of 18-year-olds to do it?
• Ar-Curunir 6y ago
  Why doesn’t the university admin sacrifice? Are they the ones being laid off/made to work overtime/at risk of infection? No, they’re not. I hate this idea that only the individual is responsible when things go bad.
  • analog31 6y ago
    Do you know it to be a fact that the admin's don't work overtime? I live in the shadow of a major state university, so I know a lot of people who work there, and for most of them the idea of working a normal 40 hour week is a pipe dream. It wouldn't shock me that they are working hours on top of their usual 50+ hour weeks to deal with covid issues. This isn't unusual for so called "exempt" employees in the US. I once read that the average professional work week in the US is 50 hours.
    • Ar-Curunir 6y ago
      Admin != staff. Staff are those that work with professors and students directly. They’re very hard workers and keep the system moving smoothly, and get paid poorly. The admin I’m talking about are the “provost of XYZ”, who don’t do anything worthwhile, but take in massive salaries, and keep pivoting universities away from education to “student satisfaction”
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    Universities have high fixed and structural costs, and to date, little has been done to address these. Several have openly stated that residence revenues (dorm fees and foodservice) are a major concern. These conflicts will continue absent means to: 1. Discharge present obligations (debt, payroll, contracts). 2. Sustain functional capacity (building and systems maintenance, skills capacity, reputation). 3. Provide minimum sufficient income for idled staff., faculty, and contractors. 4. Provide for continuity of contractors, vendors, and suppliers. Writ large this is the problem facing economies as a whole. Universities and colleges are merely one visible and vocal sector. The problem is not one of economic stimulus or simple financial reform. It's of preventive and sustaining care for the entire economy until the global health emergency is resolved.
• mrob 6y ago
  Exactly. If they are too immature to be expected to follow the safety rules, why are they still allowed to vote? Adulthood comes with responsibilities as well as privileges.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• sirspacey 6y ago
  Universities are complex combinations of several value propositions. The most significant is real estate. Universities increase the value of real estate around them as they grow. Consequently, the last decade is the largest growth in higher ed real estate expansion - precisely as the surge into digital education could not be more obvious. Most of the billions in donations that higher ed receives goes to real estate. Second, a degree is the only price protection universities enjoy. The evidence for this is massive - there has been an explosion of alternative learning institutions and systems. They can’t charge anything near what a university can. Universities are very, very aware of this. The idea that universities are a service organization is mostly a myth. They are at best a feudal cartel. More than 50% of faculty are part-time and paid very poorly. Faculty who are worth tenure are directly responsible for sourcing government grants for research. University administrators (and admission, i.e. marketing/PR departments) are painfully aware that they must project a mythic image of the “college experience” and employability in order to maintain public perception that they are a necessary right of passage. A recent study found only 2 in 100 students actually have that experience. There is one ready market for this narrative: foreign, wealthy families - for whom a college degree is access to the American economy. Universities are a highly adaptive entity that has formed over 100 years in relentless pursuit of their own survival. They have close to zero insight in terms of the education needs of students and even worse: when they are present with it they choose their fiction over a re-invention. Nothing about this is surprising - it’s how all big corporations die. To;dr; universities recognize any negotiation around reducing their price due to reduced services to be an existential threat and will fight it at all costs.