Well, DH and I were talking about this at dinner tonight-- we both agreed that while many of us
as parents might imagine a dorm living residency as
the quintissential "college experience," it just isn't necessarily so for a great many college students-- even those WITHOUT food allergies.
DD is going to have to live off-campus, or at the very least be in an efficiency with some minimal kitchen facilities. It's simply not feasible otherwise, from what we can see.
So yeah, I think that if a parent is locked into seeing college as a
residential (particularly a "dorm" or "Greek" residential) living arrangement that dictates a certain type of social existence during those years, then, yes, FA is something that is going to get in the way.
We've never really considered that such a thing MIGHT be an option for DD. Not really, anyway. Then again,
I didn't experience college that way, either. I was a commuter, and I liked that just fine, tyvm, and it wasn't "weird" given the type of campus I was on.
Maybe we're more realistic, having been faculty and having been in/around academia for so many years (decades, really)? I don't know. I just know that there are a LOT of different ways to send a kid off to college, and VERY FEW of them require meals eaten in campus residence halls.
I also don't know that there
have been "so many" people from this community-- yet-- who have had kids go off to college. The old guard around here has only two members who HAVE so far, at least that come to my mind immediately-- Peg and Jana.
Lots more of us are 1-4 years away from doing so, and even larger numbers are about 6 years away. Naturally, they're much more worried about dealing with high school and dating issues than college. (Right now, anyway.)
I'd say that means that colleges are just
starting to see the larger numbers of kids with LTFA.
I predict, unfortunately, that the tragic incident in GA is going to be repeated a few times before colleges realize that what they THINK is enough... isn't. Until now, they've not dealt with the new breed of super-allergic students. That's what I suspect, anyway. Hey, it took allergists a while to realize that kids born after ~1995 were, well,
different than all the experience they'd had with allergic children up until then-- more severe reactions, more highly sensitive, and MUCH more likely to sensitize to other allergens. FAAN is still playing catch-up with this new generation of FA kids, where the rules seem to be different. They don't outgrow when they're supposed to, they're multiply food allergic, etc. etc.
The luckiest of them are the peanut allergic kids. Because people take that one seriously.
In this first wave, the learning curve is bound to be steep. I personally have no problem saying that the risks aren't worth it to let them 'learn' on my kid.