[2006alum]

Our friends' daughter is a junior at Stanford this year.

Because juniors and seniors are doing remote learning for fall quarter, she and a few friends have decided to rent a house together someplace nice for fall quarter.  They say that a good number of their friends are doing the same.

And evidently a shared vacation rental in paradise is less expensive than being in the dorms with a food plan.

Lots of that going on for college-aged kids.  At some point, are group homes with 10 young women - who coincidentally know another rental house of 10 guys from the same school in the beach hood - all that much safer than a dorm on campus?  I'd say yes, but not by much, especially when the commingling of houses is a given.

I suspect caveat emptor is the motto of the day, something students are willing to accept and universities are content to avoid altogether.

That said, if I were a parent of such a college student, I would be seriously concerned about risks associated mental illness, substance abuse, and sexual assault, all of which often go hand in hand. Maybe it's my 15-year-old RA training kicking in, but this strikes me as setting up all the potential for the unhealthy dynamics that already exist in college housing but with none of the supervision, oversight, and guardrails colleges have spend decades (often imperfectly) building up.

I have also heard that law and business school students confronting a remote learning fall are doing the same, and I think I'd be somewhat less concerned there, especially since that dynamic was already present at many institutions in pre-COVID-19 times, the GSB probably chief among them. This is one instance in which the maturational difference between being 20 and being 25 can be pretty brobdingnagian.

[2006alum]

Our friends' daughter is a junior at Stanford this year.

Because juniors and seniors are doing remote learning for fall quarter, she and a few friends have decided to rent a house together someplace nice for fall quarter.  They say that a good number of their friends are doing the same.

And evidently a shared vacation rental in paradise is less expensive than being in the dorms with a food plan.

Lots of that going on for college-aged kids.  At some point, are group homes with 10 young women - who coincidentally know another rental house of 10 guys from the same school in the beach hood - all that much safer than a dorm on campus?  I'd say yes, but not by much, especially when the commingling of houses is a given.

I suspect caveat emptor is the motto of the day, something students are willing to accept and universities are content to avoid altogether.

That said, if I were a parent of such a college student, I would be seriously concerned about risks associated mental illness, substance abuse, and sexual assault, all of which often go hand in hand. Maybe it's my 15-year-old RA training kicking in, but this strikes me as setting up all the potential for the unhealthy dynamics that already exist in college housing but with none of the supervision, oversight, and guardrails colleges have spend decades (often imperfectly) building up.

I have also heard that law and business school students confronting a remote learning fall are doing the same, and I think I'd be somewhat less concerned there, especially since that dynamic was already present at many institutions in pre-COVID-19 times, the GSB probably chief among them. This is one instance in which the maturational difference between being 20 and being 25 can be pretty brobdingnagian.