
The Student-Blaming Has Begun - claudeganon
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-student-blaming-has-begun
======
jamestimmins
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 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.

~~~
csense
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.

~~~
willcipriano
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.

~~~
CincinnatiMan
What costs should be reduced to match the reduced revenue in this scenario?
That's where things get tricky.

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gwbas1c
It'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.

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mgraczyk
It 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
Good 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.

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mauvehaus
Part 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-
co...](https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/900782472/as-pandemic-hits-colleges-
finances-small-town-may-be-affected-too)

[1] [https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/05/13/coronavirus-
small...](https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/05/13/coronavirus-small-
college-closures)

------
neonate
[https://outline.com/Sx7fWP](https://outline.com/Sx7fWP)

~~~
rendall
Thank you!

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mehrdadn
I 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.

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SpicyLemonZest
College 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
The 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.

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spideymans
The 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
What’s particularly galling is that some of the people attempting to blame the
students are most familiar with how students behave.

~~~
MattGaiser
You don’t get a pass for bad behaviour because you have a long history of bad
behaviour.

~~~
ashtonkem
College 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.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
I 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.

~~~
danaris
I 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
Asking 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.

~~~
danaris
At the university I work at, the frat houses are owned by the university. The
vast majority of all students live in university-owned housing, and while
there _are_ unsanctioned parties in off-campus housing where the university
has no jurisdiction,

a) Most parties are not. They occur on university property. Therefore, the
university has a responsibility _and liability_ for what goes on there. b) The
university is known to lean on the local police force (which is already very
small) to not do anything about student parties either on or off campus. c)
The university has, except for this past year due to the pandemic, funded and
run every year a huge weekend-long party every spring. Until a very few years
ago, this was poorly-enough policed that students from the local high school
regularly got in and got themselves smashed. One underage girl (the last year
before they instituted stricter access controls) got so drunk she passed out
and nearly died.

This isn't about being "substitute parents". The university has a
responsibility both to its students and to the community in which it exists,
and it is blatantly shirking that responsibility just so it can give the
students a "fun experience" so they will remember it fondly and give it lots
of money as alumni. (This isn't even speculation; it is well-known that this
is the reason for the lack of policies with teeth.)

------
ip26
Administrators need to design good policy, of course.

But the fundamental implicit assumption here seems to be _" Students are not
adults"_

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
It'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
Similarly unwilling, yet we don't give _them_ a free pass for it.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I'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.

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birdyrooster
Good. People need to be held accountable.

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rendall
Annoyingly, 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
" _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)

~~~
rendall
It's more than an annoyance. I literally cannot read the article

~~~
dang
It's ok to ask for workarounds. People usually post them.

If there's truly no way to read an article, then the article would be off
topic here.

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m0zg
Reminder: 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
Students 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
Most 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.

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mlthoughts2018
It’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.

