If you attend a community college in Massachusetts this summer or fall, you will no longer be required to have a COVID-19 vaccine — with some exceptions.
Since January 2022, the state’s 15 community colleges have mandated students and staffers receive the vaccine if they’re attending classes in person or working on campus. After this spring semester, though, the schools will lift that mandate.
“We felt like it had served its purpose. It had kept our communities and our campuses safe,” said David Podell, president of Mass Bay Community College and chair of the state’s Community College Council of Presidents.
Podell said the schools are “following the science" and that it’s probably not necessary to continue to require the vaccine.
"The rates of COVID infection are low in our communities, and we felt it was safe now to drop the mandate,” he said.
Many community college students studying health care also work in hospitals and nursing homes. The schools say those students will have to follow requirements of their clinical placements or internships.
Among higher education institutions, the pandemic has hit community college enrollment the hardest, with more than 860,000 fewer students nationwide since fall 2019 to fall 2022, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Massachusetts alone has more than 10,000 fewer community college students.
Podell said he doesn’t think lifting the mandate will make a difference on enrollment one way or the other.
He points to Mass Bay, where enrollment last fall was even with the previous year — and this spring it went up 6.5%.
“That's before the change of the vaccination requirement, so we're seeing a turn,” Podell said. “It will vary from one community college to another, but overall, I think, we're seeing finally the change in people's behavior coming out of the pandemic, independent of the issue of the [vaccine] requirement.”
While the vaccine will no longer be required, the community college presidents say they're strongly encouraging all members of their communities to stay up to date on their COVID-19 vaccinations.
