State University of New York Chancellor Jim Malatras today announced that SUNY students are nearing full compliance with the New York State Vaccine Mandate, reaching 99.5 percent compliance, allowing SUNY students to enjoy a more normal on-campus college experience this semester after a difficult past year and a half.
Following months of aggressive student-driven awareness campaigns, and thanks to campus leadership and staff for establishing student friendly, safe, and easily accessible options for students, just 1,592 students remain in noncompliance—mostly commuter students from a handful of community colleges. Campuses are working one-on-one with those students to get to 100 percent compliance. When campuses first began notifying those students out of compliance on the September 27 deadline, about 10,000 students were at risk of being deregistered.
In order to reach compliance, students had to have received one or more doses of an FDA-approved vaccine, or been approved for a medical or religious exemption. SUNY student vaccination rates are significantly higher than the national rate of 64.8 percent of most college age students (ages 18-24) with at least one dose. SUNY is the largest comprehensive system of public higher education with preliminary fall enrollment of about 375,000 students, and its student vaccination rate leads many of the larger colleges and universities—about seven percent higher than Michigan State University (90 percent), 12 percent higher than University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (85 percent), and 14 percent higher than Penn State (82.9 percent).
“There is a new energy on our campuses this semester because we have fully reopened, and the main reason we’ve been able to is because our students have stepped up and have gotten vaccinated. Our students have told us they wanted to get back on campus, return to the classrooms, reconnect with their friends, and participate in live, on-campus events, like athletics and the arts,” said Chancellor Malatras. “Today’s result is a testament to our students’ determination, and we thank them for doing the right thing, setting an example for public health, and once again proving there is no safer place to learn than at a SUNY campus.”
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