NYT: Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy.

Are we finally ready to say this out loud?

The situation may be different at large public institutions. But at Boutique U, there is a noticeable pressure to proclaim our students to be amazing, wonderful, everyone's-above-average creatures, and that certainly hasn't gone away with the expectations for returning to class this Fall.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/opinion/coronavirus-college-safe.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/opinion/coronavirus-college-safe.html)

From the article: "My skepticism about the strategies under consideration is not based on videos of college students frolicking on Florida’s beaches when they were explicitly told to avoid large gatherings. Rather, it comes from more than 40 years teaching and researching young people."

"Most types of risky behavior — reckless driving, criminal activity, fighting, unsafe sex and binge drinking, to name just a few — peak during the late teens and early 20s. Moreover, interventions designed to diminish risk-taking in this age group, such as attempts to squelch binge drinking on campus, have an underwhelming track record. There is little reason to think that the approaches proposed to mitigate transmission of the coronavirus among college students will fare any better. A series of studies that compare the ways in which young people and adults think and make decisions about risk-taking confirms this."