No doubt! We always went to restaurants and even a few bars before vaccination so we are some of those adults. What we didn’t do is the late night crowded bar or party w/o mask. And that was by choice. Others - including plenty of young adults (including college kids) made different choices. I think the line of discussion here was whether we see our young people leading by example. I think the jury’s out on that, based on historical data.
2 Likes
Naturally - the earlier vaccines were authorized to adults vs. non-adults (even: automatically administered at care facilities), and/or the later they were made AVAILABLE to younger age groups at all, you’ll observe different cumulative percentages for the different age ranges.
Hopefully, requirements at colleges and schools (at least in the “cerebral” parts of the country) will push motivation for everyone working or attending.
The place with the more aggressive testing regime will find more cases than the one with a more lacks one.
If there is actually greater spread in the more permissive area that won’t show up in the numbers unless those people get tested. It’s a viscous cycle and a hiding your head under the sand technique. “ if I don’t look for it then it’s not there”.
2 Likes
We get “it’s safe, come out” propaganda about every other day from admin (while covid’s spreading as fast as you’d expect, hospitals filling/filled, etc.). A few days ago they sent out saying that the student population here was probably vaxed at the same rate as the local adult population, which is quite a high rate. How they ascertained that I don’t know, and they won’t say. The only data point I’m aware of their having, since we don’t require anybody to give any covid-related info, is wastewater testing in a couple of the dorms, which would work for a snapshot correlation. The problem: one of those dorms is the honors dorm, which is not a representative population for campus. What I would totally believe: honors vaxed at higher than local adult pop; other dorm vaxed at something inbetween state rate (around 35-40% by now, I’m guessing) and local adult rate. I’m hoping a local reporter will FOIA the info, which shouldn’t survive a HIPAA defense since it’s aggregate/anonymous.
We have a very high proportion of evangelical families, and I’m guessing that a few hundred kids’ first order of business once they got settled in was to go get their first shot, particularly if most of the other kids around them are vaxed. Like I said before, they apply social pressure with great facility. It’s unusual for a kid who shows up in a mostly-masked room to stay unmasked or return to class unmasked, especially if the prof gives a shove about it, which they’re not supposed to do but, happily, are doing anyway. In the near-universal-no-masking classes, there’s no move to put on the mask.
An interesting anecdotal divide: if what my daughter says is representative, the liberal-arts classes are masking at a far higher rate than the STEM classes are. Which I’m guessing you could correlate pretty handily to political stances, with the lib-arts kids here being significantly further left, also more likely to be from highly-educated families, than the STEM kids are. If that’s the case, or a significant part of the picture, it’d be interesting, how readily politics trump the education and seeming commitment to reason. It’d be an interesting connection with what I see on Linkedin, too, where the most aggressive anti-vax/anti-masker/covid-denialists seem to be technicians and BS-level engineers.
Also interesting: I’m teaching a couple of classes as a visitor to another course, zoom only, but have been having trouble with my connection lately, lot of dropped zooms as the modem resets. I’m quite worried about this for class, and if we weren’t in the middle of a surge I’d just go in and zoom-teach from my office. So I offered to (and will) make a backup recorded lecture just in case I don’t have this resolved before the week rolls around and my connection goes wobbly during class…and the professor whose course it is said meh, don’t put yourself out, they’re used to zoom trouble by now. Which is true, and I bet most of the students wouldn’t actually be worried if we had interruptions, would just shrug at the one more covid annoyance, especially since nothing high-stakes is going on. I can’t go with that, though, seems too unprofessional to me.
Seems too unprofessional?! It is unprofessional. If professors are going to opt out of live teaching, you’d think they would owe their students a good quality remote product in its place. Not just some pre-recorded lecture or spotty zoom connection.
5 Likes
What?
4 Likes
Probably different in different areas. In some places, “STEM” is likely to be disproportionately Asian, which tends to correlate with higher vaccination and masking rates than other races / ethnicities.
Also, “liberal arts” and “STEM” are not disjoint sets (science and math are in both categories).
Pre-recorded lectures are actually the desirable option in places where reliable high-speed internet isn’t universal. Keep in mind that when faculty have internet trouble, usually students are also having trouble, and campus networks aren’t problem-free, either. We had serious problems last year in trying to deliver courses to students who were at home and trying to go to school on phones with limited data plans, with some of us trying to teach over DSL lines that flaked when it rained. Recorded lectures are also handy for kids who are in isolation or quarantining, and it did occur to me that even this year, when the vast majority of students are on-campus, a good chunk of the class might prefer that format, even if I don’t. It worked surprisingly well last year, btw, partly because I can see who’s watching and for how long, and make sure there’s reason to pay attention all the way through. It ws a little depressing at first, because naturally they all waited till the last minute the first couple of weeks, but then they’d turn in excellent homework or show up for one-on-one meetings surprisingly well-prepared. (Incidentally, I probably watch two recorded lectures a day as I’m trying to get up to speed on intro soil science and carbon sequestration. There’s a hilarious guy at Cornell who’s got a very good, very Ithaca-centered soil-science course up on youtube, and wow is he a giant nerd with low production values, but the content is A-1. Long been a fan of the staring-camera OCW video courses, too.)
This is part of what I mean about adaptation. “College” is going to look different, going forward, and there’s going to be a lot of experimentation along the way. It just doesn’t help to get angry about it, but yes, I hope it prompts a whole lot of fine-grained, low-rhetoric conversation about what exactly the money is for and what the education is worth. I’ve said before that I could not justify teaching at a private university because with or without zoom, I cannot say to an individual 19-year-old student with a family walking a financial tightrope, “This class is worth $20K, totally do it.” Not just in terms of flat ROI – there, actually, it’s quite possible that what I’m teaching could, over a lifetime, help them earn $20K. But money isn’t that simple, nor is the situation that flatly transactional. These are conversations I think we very badly need to be having.
The infrastructure is beyond the control of the students, faculty, and often of the university. I wish it weren’t, and I spent a lot of time and energy last year wrestling with university and local/federal people to try to get them to fix ours. In an area where you’ve got a bunch of competing ISPs, maybe you’ve got better luck, but around here (as in much of the country), it can be a real struggle. The answer to that is federal, so I hope you were a big supporter of broadband in the infrastructure bill. If everyone’s flying at a rock-solid 100GB, there’s a whole lot more we can do.
2 Likes
Yes, you heard that right. Key word is “here”.
I agree with some of your points but I completely disagree with the conclusion you seem to draw from an anecdote:
College kids, and young people in general, tend to be more progressive as a group, whether they’re students in humanities/social sciences (HSS) or in STEM. STEM students may be less politically active (far fewer SJW types), not because they hold less progressive/more conservative views, but because they tend to be more occupied by their courseworks with less free time to spare (to protest, etc.). Moreover, among the HSS students, there’re some very convervative and politically active students (remember Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz?), whom you wouldn’t find among the STEM students. Vaccination and mask wearing tend to be more accepted among the STEM students because they tend to trust sciences much more. If you don’t believe me, check the vaccination rates and mask-wearing practices (even before the mandates) at some of the STEMiest colleges (e.g. Caltech or MIT). I’m not sure what types of STEM students you observed and your daughter went to school with.
6 Likes
That certainly seems to indicate your “here” is very different than almost any other place I have seen or heard of since typically the STEM kids would not be from less educated families.
5 Likes
My extended family has a lot of STEM folks as well as lib arts folks. We all believe in science, got fully vaxed (for all 12 and older) and wear masks because we care about our health and community. My relatives even had their < 1 yr old wear a mask when traveling.
Only 1 of us got covid—relative living in dorms who went to football game last year pre-VAX.
It’s not a difficult concept, except it got so politicized and so much propaganda and misinformation.
4 Likes
Not at elite/expensive schools, no. If you’re on CC, there’s a pretty good chance you haven’t spent a lot of time investigating non-selective public universities.
At most state universities it’s the norm, for the same reasons that have existed for over a century. School is expensive and has to be practical, STEM is regarded (sometimes unjustly) as practical and a path to a good salary, and the liberal arts are still “liberal” not because they’re lefty but because they demand leisure (or a willingness to stay poor). You still see a lot of kids in places like mine essentially running away to college, away from parents who don’t think it’s necessary. My department has grad students who applied secretly and later had to defend the choice by telling their parents that they were getting paid to go to school. And professors who don’t use the word “professor” when they go home. A standard part of grad ed in my department is a painful, private, and generally unsought divorce from a lower-SES family. They may have money, some of the families. Lot of trades. But the way of thinking and attitude transform in ways that turn them into strangers at home. Again, nothing here is new, but the students at elite schools are much more likely to be a few generations into the process, and more likely to be taking a place in their parents’ world than quietly slipping away.
We also have a large contingent of veteran and non-traditional (read: older) students, and they aren’t usually coming from well-off, well-educated families.
All of this, incidentally, makes covid “we don’t have a plan, we’re pretending everything is fine” approaches much worse. When you’ve got a lot of students who don’t have leeway financially, don’t have family with good healthcare options or vax likelihood, and don’t have family who can advise them on academic bumps, people get hurt and educations get interrupted. What we really need is a coherent campuswide plan that allows for:
- moving seamlessly from classroom to online at conservative, clearly-defined public health junctions;
- uniform, practical planning for infrastructure trouble;
- uniform, practical, humane policy covering students who must leave midsemester to go care for family;
- non-head-in-sand policy for covering or suspending courses with an instructor who’s ill or has died or becomes a caregiver;
- uniform expectations of online workload for faculty, students, and support staff;
- non-defensive, proactive public health communication to and with students, including regular Q&A/rumor-quelling sessions with medical and epidemiological professionals;
- inclusion of populations with health vulnerabilities, selves and at-home;
- planning to send students home and return safely, if they’re on-campus, in a way that also reaches students living off-campus.
among other things.
Yes, I’m 100% in favor of federally funded broadband expansion. It’s ridiculous that some areas of the country have such poor access.
1 Like
It seems that 9/10 faculty were positive in the last week, and 65% of all positive cases including students were in the last week. So maybe they don’t like that things are trending up?
My daughter is an electrical engineering major. Her mom is a NP and her dad is MD.
2 Likes
Is she at a noncompetitive midwestern state university?..or any noncompetitive state university, for that matter.
Here is an interesting article on the return to campus at Williams:
1 Like
Our state specializes in it. Outrage from epidemiologists, ID docs, nurses public health and information-office people who haven’t been fired yet, school officials, parents, anyone is waved away with airy talk about people worrying too much and how some people will always find problems, and how we’re not New York or other hotspot du jour (except when we are the hotspot du jour), and how one has to go out and live, and how you can’t protect against everything and most people have enough grit to etc. Fair bit of trust in prayer talk, too, especially when church services get shut down because they’re dangerous and congregants are sick. Meanwhile, my goodness, so much death and disability. They haven’t yet been able to shut down the private team that’s tracking, graphically, deaths per month for the last several years, so that you can see the enormous differences since covid hit. They do try to dismiss them as randos on the internet, but those randos are endorsed and publicized by people with all the right letters after their names, all the right positions at the right sort of VMOKD schools. When that doesn’t work, they just try to discredit the pros as overpaid ivory-tower types. Pedigreed ivory tower types, internet randos, nobody does it for them, it seems.
Or perhaps there is a difference by gender, with the males willing to take more Covid risk than the females? Just a thought. You’d tend to see some STEM majors skewing toward male, although as pointed out, many STEM courses are going to fulfill lib arts requirements and might even be offered as a liberal arts major. It’ll really depend on which STEM courses were observed.
Even non-selective publics will have a relatively selective admission process for entry to some courses of study; for instance, Engineering, C/S, or Nursing (to cite a few examples that rely heavily on STEM). Notably, unlike a larger “college of arts and sciences” which can welcome in thousands, those more competitive programs usually matriculate a smaller group of students. It’s one reason why they are relatively selective and the degree is typically considered more prestigious than, say, a basic BA from State U.
1 Like