Was it realistic to expect college students to follow COVID-19 protocols? The science suggests no.

Back in June, leading adolescent brain researcher Laurence Steinberg wrote a New York Times op-ed predicting that students returning to college campuses during a pandemic would not go well.“These plans are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of COVID-19 among students, faculty and staff,” wrote Steinberg, who is a professor of psychology at Temple University and the author of “Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence.”He was right, of course. A late September survey conducted by the New York Times looked at more than 1...