The Problem with Reopening Colleges? Students
June 18, 2020
Believing they can protect students against the coronavirus, many universities are set to reopen this fall. But their plans “are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional,” says the psychologist Laurence Steinberg, citing research showing that the way young people think and make decisions about risk-taking makes them prone to behaviors capable of defeating any safety precautions. What makes young people so reckless, he explained in Issues, is that their brains simply have not matured, a fact that raises challenges for decision-makers across society in dealing with this population.