Coastal Carolina offered students incentives to get COVID vaccines. Did they work?
As a variety of COVID-19 vaccine incentives emerged over the past year, some worked while others didn’t.
At Coastal Carolina University, it appears the administration’s attempts to urge their students to get the shot came up short.
CCU rolled out its “Vax to the Max” program last year, offering different incentives for vaccinated students including a chance at free tuition for a semester, but declined the route taken by some other universities that required vaccines and even booster shots.
Almost six months into the 2021-22 school year, just 44% of the CCU student body is vaccinated, according to university data as of Feb. 2. The data used by the university includes proof of vaccination that was voluntarily uploaded, according to CCU spokesperson Jerry Rashid.
That falls far behind several of CCU’s peers in South Carolina. Clemson University, University of South Carolina and College of Charleston all recorded more than 60% of its students vaccinated, according to the schools’ respective COVID-19 dashboards. College of Charleston leads the pack with a nearly 80% student vaccination rate.
Jim Solazzo, CCU’s vice president for student success, enrollment management and student affairs, said the vaccine incentive program has encouraged students to get inoculated, noting just more than 20% of students reported being vaccinated at the beginning of September.
“It also provides a useful database that greatly helps our COVID contact tracing team in its processes,” Solazzo wrote in an email to The Sun News.
In the wake of the omicron variant spurring a serious increase in COVID-19 cases on and off campus, causing the university to reinstate its mask mandate, leaders still don’t anticipate requiring vaccines, opting to encourage them instead.
“The University will continue to monitor conditions and may adjust campus-wide mitigation measures, if needed,” Carissa Medeiros, head of CCU’s emergency management, wrote in an email.
While vaccine incentives may have increased the number of students on CCU’s campus who are vaccinated, that number isn’t quite where school leaders want it to be. The national vaccination rate among people ages 18-24 is about 61%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We’d like to meet or exceed that number,” Solazzo said.
This story was originally published February 10, 2022 at 9:00 AM.
