We had a “State of Union” speech yesterday from our President, because even venerable academic institutions love dad jokes, which included a version of the image above. This is the dashboard showing results from our mandatory Covid testing program on campus, and illustrates my favorite (darkly) amusing stat of the last couple of years. If you use those numbers to calculate the positive test percentage for faculty and staff, it’s markedly higher than that for students (0.31% vs. 0.21%).
This is amusing (to me, anyway) because in August of 2020, before we re-opened with a limited number of students on campus, there was a lot of faculty chatter about what a terrible idea it was. A fairly common refrain was that there was no way our students could possibly be expected to abide by the making and distancing requirements needed to keep from having a massive outbreak on campus. But they did, and in fact, fared just as well in percentage terms as the faculty and staff. And this year they’re doing even better.
Now, you can easily construct a just-so story to explain this result (faculty and staff are more likely to be out and about in the broader community, while students can more easily stay in the safety of the campus bubble). And the whole thing could still blow up at any minute—the mandatory testing results from yesterday (including my weekly nose swab) and today won’t be available for another day or two. But just getting through this term (tomorrow is the last day of classes) is a testament to the resilience and responsibility of our students, in the face of societal expectations, and worth celebrating.
You could also probably write this off as a reflection of our highly privileged population, but the general phenomenon of young people being more resilient than expected extends well outside the elite private college bubble. The proximate cause of this post isn’t just yesterday’s speech, but this poll of young people from FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos (which they posted a week ago, but I only got around to reading this morning as I was doing tab clearance). Their summary from Maggie Koerth’s write-up is pretty good:
To help answer those questions, we partnered with our friends at Ipsos, the polling firm, to work on a poll that asked parents and kids how they’re doing. Between Oct. 25 and Nov. 2, FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos used Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel to survey 689 kids ages 5 to 11, 572 kids ages 12 to 17 (let’s call them “teens” for our purposes), and more than 1,500 of their parents.1 The answers were surprising! We found a population of kids who appear to be pretty resilient, even in the face of loneliness and isolation, and who are forming strong relationships with their parents and families. Any one kid who’s struggling because of the pandemic is a source of concern. Overall, though, America’s kids aren’t as downtrodden as they’re often made out to be.
(Click through for a lot more detail, most of it positive; it’ll brighten your morning.)
This also fits pretty well with my anecdotal experience as a parent. Our kids have been going to in-person school at least half-time since September of 2020, and that’s gone much more smoothly than I expected going in, and I was relatively optimistic about the whole thing. The kids are doing a great job keeping safe, and aren’t suffering anywhere near as much as online chatter might’ve led you to expect.
On top of that, there’s a brand-new story from the Upshot on a global survey, which again is surprised to find a lot of optimism and resilience among young people:
The survey was of 21,000 people in two age groups — 15 to 24, and 40 and up — and included nationally representative samples from all regions of the world. The younger group said that children today were better off in basic ways, like education, health care and physical safety. In the median country, 57 percent of them said the world was becoming a better place with each generation, compared with 39 percent of older people.
The optimism is more concentrated in the developing world; young people in rich countries are much more negative about the future. But the number of young people in the US who think that today’s children will be better off in the future is still 43%, which you’d never guess from reading Twitter.
And that’s my very predictable grumble about this: that these relatively upbeat stories get so little traction. I saw the FiveThirtyEight piece shared a few times last week (that’s why it was open in a tab), but very little discussion of it— it just floated away on the sea of negativity that is Twitter. The Upshot piece is very new, so I haven’t seen much about it, but I don’t expect its reception to be much different. If it crops up at all outside of their direct promotion of it, I expect it will be from people playing up the negative aspects.
This is part of a phenomenon I’ve been complaining about since the very early days of this Substack, the way that positive stories get buried in a flood of negativity. And as I’ve said before, I think this is exacerbated by deeply ingrained norms of journalism.
Which means it’s important to push back a little when the opportunity arises, and try to remind people that not everything sucks. Kids in general are doing better than you might be led to believe, both subjectively (survey results) and objectively (testing results), and that’s reason to be optimistic.
If you haven’t been burned out by me hitting this theme multiple times since July, and would like more, here are some buttons:
If you’d like to come crashing in with the negative waves like Moriarty in Kelly’s Heroes, I guess the comments will be open.