.gif)
Most schools opt to strongly encourage inoculation and continue safety measures.
Only one of the roughly 140 US schools that belong to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) is planning to require students to receive COVID-19 vaccines before starting school in the fall: Seattle Pacific University.
The rest will “strongly encourage” vaccines, according to CCCU spokeswoman Greta Hays, while leaving the ultimate decision up to individual students and their families. While the evangelical institutions want to ensure campus-wide health and administrators widely support inoculations, they are also concerned about the impact vaccine requirements would have on enrollment.
At Westmont College, in Santa Barbara, California, the head of enrollment estimated a vaccine requirement could mean the 1,300-student school has 200 fewer students enrolled in the fall.
“For a school our size, that’s a chunk,” said Irene Neller, Westmont’s vice president of enrollment, marketing and communications. “It’s financially driven in many regards. State-funded schools can really be black and white. … But a lot of the private, smaller campuses, Christian or secular, just can’t.”
Evangelical Christian colleges get about 80 percent of their revenue from tuition. Unlike big state schools and Ivy League institutions, they generally can’t rely on big endowments or donors. Year to year, the financial health of the school depends on the number of students arriving in the fall.
Neller said Westmont and other evangelical schools recognize the controversy around vaccinations and also the range of reasons people don’t want to be required to get the vaccine—some motivated by politics, some cautious about the science, and some citing health conditions ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
via
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
