Swimming is not the only form of cardiovascular exercise and open water is not the only place to swim.
It's easy to cite the injury stats for these and use that as a reason to avoid, but my point is we rarely look at the other side. Kids' interest differs and the more activities we ban, the more we curtail the set of potential interests that get kids off the couch and outside.
Also, it sounds like the problem is the school's administration is behaving tyrannically for its own institutional self-perpetuation and a lot of the bans are not actually motivated by saving lives.
I get that while modern society is often overprotective, but this sort of hysteria about hysteria seems to be un-nuanced and one-sided. I mean, you want to talk skateboarding, apparently they're letting kids compete these days and 9-year old Ema Kawakami became the very first person to land three 900s in a row, something that Tony Hawk spent years trying to accomplish.
The issue is the visibility is very one-sided. Everyone reads about the rare case where a kid drowns while unsupervised swimming. No one reads about the hundreds of thousands of kids that do it with no issues.
Let people take risk if they understand it and accept the risk. The university should not be held liable but the kid should not be prevented. Risk is often the price of freedom.
> Everyone reads about the rare case where a kid drowns while unsupervised swimming.
It doesn't seem to be all that infrequent when it's happening on an annual basis.
Anyway, ultimately the danger isn't even necessarily a swimming issue, so much as college men getting drunk and going near bodies of water (to swim or otherwise).