More Colleges to Require Student Covid-19 Vaccinations

A small but growing number of colleges will require students to receive a Covid-19 vaccine, saying it is the most assured way of returning to some semblance of pre-pandemic campus life.

But by doing so, they are stepping into the increasingly politically charged debate over whether businesses and other institutions should be able to make inoculation a condition of participating in events in person.

Duke University in North Carolina, Brown University in Rhode Island and Syracuse University in New York announced last week that students must be vaccinated to be allowed on campus in the fall. They join a handful of other colleges that include Rutgers University in New Jersey and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., that have recently announced students must be vaccinated to matriculate for in-person classes.

Others, such as the University of California system, said their vaccination policies for the fall are still in development.

Mandating the vaccine was a natural next step as accessibility opened up and supply increased, said school leaders at Rutgers, Cornell, and others.