There’s no way for university officials to protect students from every bad decision they could make.

Counting on college students to use even a modicum of good judgment isn’t always a safe strategy.

But, at the same time, it’s unreasonable — or actually, impossible — for officials at Kansas University or any other school to protect students from lapses of judgment that could lead to serious injury or even death.

This issue is being discussed at KU now because of the death this week of an Oliver Hall resident who fell to his death apparently after stepping onto the concrete ledge beneath his seventh-story window to smoke a cigarette. This certainly was a tragic occurrence, but what could the university have done to prevent it?

• It could have prevented the student from taking such a risk by allowing smoking in the residence hall, but that would raise the chances of a fire that could injure many students.
• It could put bars or tamper-proof screens on the windows so they couldn’t be opened, but that also would pose additional hazards to students in case of fire.
• It could remove the ledges, but because the structure depends on them for support, that’s hardly a feasible solution, although alternative design options might be considered in future construction.

The answer keeps coming back to student behavior. Why would a student climb out a seventh-floor window rather than going downstairs and outside to smoke? Why would a student, whose story was reported in the university newspaper, choose to walk along the ledge and try to get into her room through a window rather than dealing with her forgotten room key by paying the fee to have her door unlocked? Who can figure what students are going to do next?

There probably are just certain inherent dangers associated with trying to provide education and housing services for more than 20,000 students, many of them in their late teens and living away from home for the first time. They’re mostly good people, but their lack of life experience, when mixed with a general feeling of immortality, can lead them to take unreasonable risks. The university should provide every reasonable protection, but it can’t possibly design facilities and policies that respond to every bad decision a student might make.

The death of a 19-year-old student from Illinois was a horrible waste. Perhaps the best that could come out of such a tragedy is for other students to learn a hard lesson about life — that bad things DO happen to good people and a single lapse in judgment can be a life-or-death decision.