Vaccine mandates aren’t enough
Healthy lifestyle requirements will help our future graduates succeed.
Every year, millions of new students arrive at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. For this incoming class, university or college represent hope, a new life, and the prospect of a fulfilling future as an independent adult. Typically seventeen or eighteen years old, these students represent our future workers and leaders. However, many schools are currently letting them down — by neglecting their health, graduating students who are in worse physical shape than when they began their studies.
This may seem a trivial point. Everyone is used to the idea of the Freshman 15, to the point where it’s become a joke. However, the deconditioning that happens with a life of studies, junk food and intellectualism is a far greater public health problem than most people realize — because ultimately, being in bad shape robs our students of their future opportunities.
Take for example some of the best professions out there, such as medicine, nursing, law enforcement, physical therapy, and teaching. Each of these professions has a list of physical requirements that candidates must meet in order to work in the field, even though we don’t normally discuss such requirements.
For example, nurses and health care aides stand a fair bit, move around, crouch, lift heavy objects, and require hand-eye coordination. Furthermore, they need to have sound sleep in order to function properly, they need to be socially comfortable in order to survive in the workplace, and they need a certain quickness and flexibility of thought and action.
These qualities are present in most youngsters who have had physical education their entire lives. But when you take a cohort of seventeen year-olds and put them in a building with lots of books to study and easily available vending machines, with no dietary or physical education requirements, you produce soft people, deconditioned, less capable of the physical demands of many jobs.
And this doesn’t just include so-called “good” careers like nursing, it also includes all manner of working class jobs, the kind that people may discover they prefer in the end, or the only kind that may be available in this competitive job market where a university degree often seems like the new high school diploma. You can’t be a plumber, an electrician, a health care aide, a daycare worker, a factory worker, a waiter or waitress, or a flight attendant if you are in poor health.
Pretty much, poor health, poor mobility, weakness, and difficulties with concentration and clear thought tend to doom people to rather boring and disappointing jobs, such as being paper pushers in bureaucracies. And then, once ensconced in these jobs, people are not able to leave the “office ghetto”. They simply do not have the physical capacity. And other problems follow: obesity, knee problems, hip problems, etc.
But what if all of this could be prevented at the post-secondary level with the right attention to the health of university and college students, in terms of teaching and enforcing standards of healthy lifestyle?
Before I go further, however, I want to say that there will always be students who struggle with health problems and disabilities that have nothing whatsoever to do with lifestyle. Disability accommodation is a basic human right and not something that should ever stop even with general health requirements.
In my next article, I will expand on this concept and describe what a “health mandate” would look like in practice: the curricular and extracurricular changes that would produce a healthier and happier campus population and future workers with a full slate of occupational choices.
