South OC Times

Soka University of America is one of only 15 colleges in California that requires students to have a COVID-19 vaccine, despite more than 90% of colleges dropping vaccine mandates by August.

Updated data from Better Colleges showed Soka University of America is one of 15 colleges in August requiring a COVID-19 vaccine to be on-campus, in residence, or attend specific programs during the 2023-24 school year.

At the same time, reporting from the educational awareness group No College Mandates showed that 90% of U.S. colleges by August had rolled back their COVID-19 mandates.

“Is it any wonder college enrollment is down?” No College Mandates co-founder Lucia Sinatra wrote in a February 2023 opinion piece.

“The graduating class of 2023 has hardly known the freedoms older generations enjoyed — exuberant and unrestricted socializing, in-person intellectual debates and, of course, the freedom to choose whether to take an experimental medical intervention,” she wrote with Yasmina Palumbo of the pandemic response accountability group Restore Childhood.

Ian Miller with the news organization Outkick claimed the schools still requiring COVID-19 vaccines were implementing a “historically indefensible policy” that showed how “progressive administrators are more concerned with ideological virtue signaling than following science.”

The public health emergency about COVID-19 was officially closed by the CDC in May, 2023.

School Name	City
American Jewish University	Los Angeles
California College of the Arts	San Francisco
Claremont Graduate University	Claremont
Dominican University of California	San Rafael
Pitzer College	Claremont
Saint Mary's College of California	Moraga
Santa Clara University	Santa Clara
Scripps College	Claremont
Soka University of America	Aliso Viejo
Southern California Institute of Architecture	Los Angeles
University of Redlands	Redlands
University of San Francisco	San Francisco
University of the Pacific	Stockton
University of the West	Rosemead
Western University of Health Sciences	Pomona