Agree. If we are all going back to work (and we are, no doubt in my mind all going back to work by July the latest) then faculty and staff are going back to work too. They are not special. They can space out the classroom and lecture from a podium. Alot easier for them than the workers on the factory line or the chicken plant.
Much office work can be – and is – performed from home.
If students are still required to wear their masks on campus, how can the college put them in a dorm where wearing masks inside is impractical and physical separation is impossible?
Most work is not done from home except for a group of often highly compensated professionals. The rest of the labor force needs to show up. For those familiar with living arrangements in San Francisco or Manhattan, dormitories can seem spacious.
If a classroom holds 30 students they can put 15 in if they use every other seat. What happens to the other 15? They get a virtual class while paying the same price as those in the classroom? That won’t go over well.
The professor could teach the other 15 students in a 2nd section, but it’s twice the lectures (and labs, if it’s a lab course). They won’t be doing double the work for free, even if colleges had enough classrooms to hold an entire 2nd set of classes (they don’t). Who would pay for it? The money already lost this semester (from room & board refunds and drop in endowment values) is already going to cost campus jobs. Colleges won’t be able to pay faculty to take on additional classes, and tenured faculty aren’t doing double duty for free. If parents demand social distancing in the classroom, I’d expect to have those costs added to your tuition.
Group A goes to class Monday and group B goes Wednesday. The ones not going on the day do live streaming…
Heh, it’s a thought…
At least for colleges that are residential, the primary constraint for physical separation is going to be the dorms, not classrooms.
My son works for a company that provides tech support for various large companies around Denver, a lot in the insurance, oil & gas, finance, engineering and tech industry. The vast majority of the firm’s clients have all but shuttered their offices. There aren’t even admins around. Same in the local aerospace industry: those folks are working from home, a week on, week off. You can find parking anywhere downtown and in the tech center. So no, as much as they’d like to show up, the labor force at least where I live is staying home through the end of May at least.
I have wondered if colleges could rent out some nearby motels/hotels to reduce dorm density. Figuring that travel is so diminished, maybe they could secure some good deals and run shuttles to campus. Might be cost prohibitive – I don’t know.
One “bubble boy” bubble for each dorm resident and an air purifier for each room. :lol:
Students wearing masks around campus may be more about protecting the professors and support staff than it would be about protecting the students themselves.
At my daughter’s school, all the freshmen lived in the ‘village’ and the seven identical dorms were all suites, with 4 students each having their own bedrooms and sharing the double bathrooms, living room and kitchen (but they ate in the dining hall as real cooking wasn’t allowed). Most of the dorms were like this with only a few ‘traditional’ with hallway bathrooms.
I could seem them deeming the suite a ‘family’ and not requiring social distancing in the suite, but elsewhere. There’d be a problem with the labs as most are used from early in the morning until late at night as it is, so if they had to schedule double the classes in order to spread out, there just might not be enough hours in the day. It would also require sanitizing each lab space after each use.
I was just on a call with a friend who is a middle school teacher. They are talking about having half the kids come every other day. She teaches computer labs and said she had 36 kids in each class, so half would be 18 and she has room for that with distancing. Of course, they are using keyboards and screens that have to be cleaned after every use. Then she’d have to teach 2x as much per day or send home an entire day of work every day as homework. Of course since these kids are 11-14, some still need a lot of supervision (daycare), so who will do that on their off days?
Will there be masks available for purchase? On Amazon there is nothing available sooner than June 1. Kids will not be washing their bandana masks regularly.
A crew neck T-shirt can be used as a mask (no cutting, no sewing). Pull it partway on so that the neck line is between your eyes and your nose, then tie the sleeves behind your head to make it stay put.
As far as regular washing goes, if your kid has enough T-shirts or bandanas to have enough clean ones for the interval between laundry days, that should be enough.
My D20 will attend Barnard in the fall, and obviously we have no idea if it will be in person or online. There is no way for colleges to know yet.
However, she just received an email from the college’s financial aid department that students receiving grant aid will be awarded a one-time $2,500 Summer Work Exemption Grant. This is to acknowledge that students may not be able to find summer jobs to supplement their contribution towards their COA.
I find this incredible - even in these uncertain times, they are thinking of their students and how this may be affecting them and their future. My D20 said it makes her feel “like the school really cares about their students,” and that couldn’t make her happier.
Kudos to Barnard.
Wow, @Dancingmom518, that is very impressive! 
I saw on another thread that Bowdoin is doing that as well.
Several colleges are planning on boosting aid to students because of the financial challenges families are facing. On the back end, salaries will be cut and staff jobs will be lost. So some families will still enjoy the luxury of sending their kids to residential college while others (many of whom struggle to send their kids to the local commuter school or cc) will be out of a job.
I hope other colleges do this too. A few CSUs (California State Universities) posted financial aid rewards but we have regular work study $. Will we even be able to get a remote work study job? Much doubts.
This is a hard time for MOST people. Many of those sending their children to residential colleges are also struggling. One friend has postponed retirement; a couple I know are taking a home equity loan to pay for their kids’ colleges after the mom lost her job. My husband had to lay off everyone in his firm, and his business is DEAD and will remain that way likely for another year to 18 months. I thank god I don’t have children in college right now. And I don’t begrudge anyone a helping hand from a school, no matter how modest or generous.