On the checklist of things to do before arriving on campus this fall, college students now have another requirement: They must get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Dozens of universities have announced that COVID-19 vaccines will be mandatory for all students hoping to return to in-person learning this September. Yale University was one of the first schools to introduce this requirement, with President Peter Salovey informing the campus that the vaccine mandate would apply to all undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students before the federal government had even approved vaccine use for students younger than 18 years old. The mandate is necessary, Salovey said, because vaccination is the only way the school can guarantee a minimal transmission of the virus.
The rest of the Ivy League followed suit. The University of Notre Dame and the University of California school system were next. And this week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo took things a step further and decided that the state university system would do the same.
“No excuses,” he said on Monday. The State University of New York’s board “will require vaccinations for all in-person students coming back to school in the fall. [If] you’re a young person [and] you go to a SUNY school … you must have a vaccine to come back in September.”
But this could end up being a problem for universities. Young adults are among the most hesitant when it comes to the coronavirus vaccines, in large part because they don’t fear the coronavirus. And rightly so — 20-year-olds are much, much less likely to fall seriously ill if they do contract COVID-19.
Nearly half of young adults surveyed in a recent poll said they did not want to be vaccinated. Only 35% said they would agree to get the vaccine, and 18% said they weren’t sure. The numbers are clear: Given the choice, young adults would rather risk COVID-19 than be inoculated against it.
Taking that choice away from students will force more of them to get vaccinated, but it won’t alleviate any of the concerns they might have about the vaccines. Less than a quarter of young adults said they were confident in the vaccine’s effectiveness, the poll found, and many are worried about the vaccine’s side effects, which tend to hit younger people harder.
But that’s a risk many students would be willing to take if they knew it would guarantee a normal college experience. Unfortunately, universities’ vaccine mandates are a reminder that “normal” is a subjective term, one these colleges will have no problem changing.
