While students on campus are busy focusing on their studies or deciding what to eat for their next meal of the day, another important factor that is a part of their daily life is keeping clean and healthy.
With this in mind, students will sometimes expect the campus they enrolled in to have a consistently clean environment.
According to a July Ecolab report, nine in 10 students consider themselves healthy. However, half of these students think their campus is not meeting the standard, barely making health or cleanliness a priority.
The report also showed 27 per cent of students base their post-secondary selection more on the school’s campus instead of the programs it offers.
Furthermore, 90 per cent of students think the lack of cleanliness on the campus they enrolled in poses a distraction to their daily education.
Whether students take cleanliness seriously or not, another major concern arises when students’ health begins to be impacted by the unhealthy atmosphere.
Vanguard Cleaning Systems reported in Aug. 2022 that several types of harmful bacteria were found on campus grounds.
They said this includes Gram-negative Rods, a bacteria that is a major factor in meningitis and pneumonia, as well as Gram-positive Cocci, which can cause strep and staph infection, meningitis, cholecystitis, and scarlet fever, and Bacillus which raises the risk of contracting anthrax and food poisoning.
These different types of bacteria can severely affect a student on campus with their illnesses, possibly resulting in them skipping classes and falling back on their studies.
However, sometimes it’s not always the campus’s fault and students need to take more responsibility for keeping a clean atmosphere.
The main cause of this lack of cleanliness from students is possibly stress from the workload in their program.
The Archive Concierge said in an article in September 2021 that stress can make even the most routine proper hygiene tasks feel nearly impossible to start, keeping up with proper hygiene as a struggle simply becomes an afterthought.
While these struggles for students are understandable, it should not excuse this kind of habit at a post-secondary level and campuses should do more to help tackle this issue.
Let’s use Humber’s Learning Skills Workshop as a good example. Currently, the Learning Skills Workshop focuses on improving students’ academic standings such as performing better on tests or trying to remember important notes.
Workshop sessions similar to this that revolve around proper cleanliness should be considered.
They could teach students the most important steps to staying clean, why staying clean is important, what benefits they will gain from this and how they can continue to contribute towards helping the campus stay clean.
This can encourage students and their classmates to stay healthy and be successful.
The lack of cleanliness campuses can sometimes have is not excusable whatsoever and is heavily affecting students. However, this crisis can be averted if both students and staff need to come together to help keep campuses clean to avoid this major concern to ensure students can study and teachers can teach.
