Going off to college is, for many young adults, their first real plunge into freedom and adulthood. It’s where they’re encouraged to take risks and find new connections in dining halls and laundry rooms.
But those collegiate rites of passage aren’t possible if they’re largely confined to an extra-long twin bed in a stuffy dorm room, peering out at the world through barred windows.
The fall 2020 semester looks a lot like that for some undergraduates who’ve returned to campus during the pandemic.
And as anticipated, some of those undergrads have already started to rebel.
Social students have packed fraternity houses and dorm hallways and snaked their way through bars – all venues for coronavirus transmission. Schools including the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and the University of Notre Dame have had to transition to virtual classes, at least for a time, after cases cropped up days into the semester.
It’s easy to blame the clusters of cases solely on the students – it plays perfectly into the stereotype of teenage recklessness and vanity.
But their risky decisions have more to do with their development and mental resilience than conscious rule-breaking, three developmental psychologists told CNN.
Meet the experts
CNN spoke with the following experts about the drivers behind these risky decisions:
- Hannah Schacter, an assistant professor and developmental psychologist at Wayne State University
- Ben Locke, the senior director for Counseling & Psychological Services at Pennsylvania State University
- Mary Karapetian Alvord, director of the private practice Alvord, Baker & Associates who mostly counsels children, teens and young adults.
All three experts know college students well. Schacter teaches them; Locke counsels them on campus; Alvord is their psychologist back at home.
Collegiate life doesn’t look at all like what it used to, but many of the exciting firsts college promises – freedom, independence and friendships – are still there, and they’re still luring students to act in ways that can expose them or others to coronavirus, they said.
Teens are wired to take risks
There’s some truth to the teenage stereotype of risk taking. Young adults are more prone to make in-the-moment decisions because they’re wired that way.
During adolescence and into adulthood, the brain region most sensitive to social rewards – the amygdala – develops at a much faster rate than the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational, consequence-driven decision making.
That imbalance may drive them to make decisions others deem risky, like visiting friends or attending a party, Locke said.
“Their decision making … is more about ‘what’s in the moment, what am I missing out on, what is the thing that would make me happiest in this moment?’” he said.
Teens are also particularly sensitive to the potential rewards of risky decisions at this stage in their life. It’s not that they don’t understand the negative consequences, but they struggle to regulate those impulses that lead them to take risks because the potential reward is too great, said Schacter, who leads a lab at Wayne State University on adolescent relationships.
“It’s this combination of being restricted from social contact for a while at an age where spending time with peers is so essential to development, to making teenagers feel good, and so, there’s some sort of calculation going on where the perceived benefit – ‘I get to spend time with friends’ – seems to be outweighing the potential costs,” Schacter said.
When you plop students back on campus after a spring and summer spent cooped up in their childhood bedrooms, many of them will take those opportunities to connect with their friends and strangers. Their fear of the virus may be overtaken by their eagerness to connect, she said.
They depend on social connections to build their identities
The pandemic hasn’t dulled young people’s desire to belong.
“No one’s going back to college because they want to sit in their dorm all weekend by themselves,” Schacter said.
Peer approval is increasingly important throughout adolescence, and young adults depend on their social connections to build their identities. They still want to see their friends and meet new people, a hallmark of college that’s become increasingly difficult when classes are conducted with students six feet apart – or states apart, over Zoom.
So some will party.
“Peers are so essential that it’s no coincidence that we’re seeing these behaviors more and that they’re particularly peer-oriented,” Schacter said.
And there is a risk teenagers take quite seriously – the risk of rejection. So if they see someone they respect or admire, or with some sort of perceived social power, ignoring social distancing guidelines or attending a party, they may hesitate to call that person out – criticizing another student could mean their ostracization, Locke said.
Alvord studies resilience, or the ability to cope with crises. Social connections, she said, build resilience. Having strong bonds and strong friendships helps us get through difficult times – including times like these.
For some students, isolation may feel scarier than the virus itself.
“The sense of belonging and peer acceptance, I think, outweighs judgment,” Alvord said.
They are getting mixed messages from adults
Colleges can’t seem to decide whether it’s safe for students to return to campus. Many universities gave students mere days to move off-campus in March and resume classes virtually. Months later, they’re canceling in-person classes after clusters of coronavirus cases appeared.
But because schools have reopened, students may assume that they’ll be safe to resume life as they knew it, Alvord said.
They may also have internalized the general advice toward the beginning of the pandemic, Alvord said, which government officials have repeated in bids to reopen schools – that children and teens are far less likely to get sick from coronavirus. (The risk of death is still relatively low, but some teenagers have died from Covid-19).
“The knowledge base has shifted, but I think it’s sort of reinforced for a lot of them that they were not part of the high-risk group,” Alvord said.
Reopening schools and bringing students back to campus open up opportunities for exposure they wouldn’t have had at home. The very act of resuming in-person classes makes it more likely for some students to do risky things, Schacter said.
“We can’t control much, but we can control what sort of opportunities students have to break these rules,” she said. “Most college campuses are literally engineered to promote social interaction. Students coming back … must navigate this in a way it wasn’t built for.”
Universities host students from across the US and the world. Every family, city, state and country is handling coronavirus in unique ways. Bring them all back to campus and there are bound to be disconnects in whether they obey social distancing and mask guidelines, Locke said.
“The polarization of mask wearing as a public health expectation is something that’s embedded in the arrival of students,” he said.
They’re still processing the pandemic
Disappointment is inevitable in times like these. Dashed expectations coupled with the challenges brought on by the pandemic that affect students in different ways leave them to navigate the uncertain present on their own.