@4kids4us can you share which school made that decision to start and end early?
@Dream20school Did your son pick another Canadian university or is he staying in the U.S.?
Plus - according to worldometer, Sweden currently has 343 deaths per million and the US has 254 deaths per million. So isn’t the situation more like a difference of 89 deaths/million? So, we’re talking about 31,000 less deaths …roughly.
That sounds like a pretty substantial number when you consider that the US currently has about 84,000 COVID deaths.
Not to get too pedantic…
We are Canadian but will attend a US school.
This. I teach middle school, and my district has provided me with extensive professional development re: distance learning since mid-March. I’ve watched hours and hours of a huge range of teaching quality in the process, and it’s definitely eye-opening . Teaching isn’t something anybody can just start doing well out of the blue, online or in person. If it were, then we wouldn’t have so many parents in this pandemic declaring that they now have more of an appreciation for what we actually do…
My experience with colleagues has been that those who were strong teachers prior to this situation are still fabulous. They may have had to get caught up on the technology learning curve aspect, but good instruction is good instruction. In some ways, you better be excellent to make it work remotely, because you can’t rely on your personality or other factors that can overcompensate irl for lack of instructional skill.
I’ve also seen that those who were mediocre teachers prior to this are exposed—they can’t hide behind simply assigning and grading anymore. They have to teach and engage learners, and some are struggling to do so.
The problem with trying to guess from everyone’s numbers, and just making up numbers, is that in reality there are those for whom there is no upper bound which they would find troubling or not worth it, as it were. Why pretend that there is?
@rickle1 I agree that the discussion of acceptable risk, in the context of risk reduction rather than elimination, is a legitimate one. That’s a question we need to face as a society at a macro level. But that’s not the question college administrators are facing (and I’m not suggesting that you said it was). Theirs is more of a micro level question involving institutional risks and responsibilities. So even if the societal question is decided in favor of fewer restrictions, it might not change the calculus for individual institutions. It is one thing for a society to accept scattered outbreaks, quite another for a residential college to accept the prospect of an outbreak within their own campus community. In that sense, administrators contemplating reopening colleges are facing far greater risks and complexity than large or small businesses, local governments, K-12 schools.
There is no perfect, risk free solution to this situation. As others have noted, the risk to college students of a bad outcome from covid infection (hospitalization or death) is incredibly low (much lower than the risk of a college student dying from a car accident, to put it in perspective). Colleges and universities cannot continue online learning and await a vaccine or curative treatment which may never come. The virus will be around for many months or years, and we as a society need to manage risk and live with the virus. Of course, colleges students interact with older professors and community members who may be more vulnerable. In Massachusetts, the median age of covid fatalities is 82. 60% of fatalities were nursing home residents with other serious conditions. 90 % of all covid fatalities were over 65 years old. The vulnerable groups need to be isolated to reduce their risk. This is a risk benefit analysis that is a feature of government policy making.
We make choices that cost lives in many areas of public policy, from highway speed limits, to the frequency and age thresholds for medical screening tests. For communicable diseases, we have to admit that if we had societal lockdowns every year from October to April we’d save many thousands of people from dying of the flu. But we don’t do that. We have as a society tacitly acknowledged that there will be some loss of life from infectious disease while society functions. No, COVID is not the same as the flu. But claiming we can’t risk any lives isn’t the honest starting point either. We need to own up to that reality. The truth is covid is not “an equal opportunity killer” as cable news pundits have claimed. This type of claim by influential media personalities shapes public opinion and will extend the socio-economic devastation we have in a way that destroys careers and shatters opportunities, especially for young people.
Regis University in Denver is one that has shifted its schedule. Start mid-Aug, no breaks until Thanksgiving, and then do 2 weeks of finals online in December.
I don’t see why schools are worrying about Thanksgiving. This Thanksgiving is not going to be like others with students traveling home for dinner with Granny and Aunt Sue. There aren’t going to be traditional family dinners, Black Friday shopping, Lions and Cowboys football. I don’t see why schools can’t plan on classes right through Thanksgiving (maybe take the Thursday off), and just finish the semester a little early.
My daughter went to a school with a lot of international students. Since 1/3 of the students didn’t celebrate thanksgiving, they thought it was more important to have a compact semester and a longer holiday break than to have a fall break and a Thanksgiving break.
Schools don’t want students leaving campus so why give breaks?
I think this is such a great plan and I wish all schools went with this calendar this year. Kids can still get Labor Day and Columbus Day off on campus for a break.
https://www.lssu.edu/coronavirus/
Location and school size should be noted.
No spring break, and the holiday break between semesters is about 7 weeks.
US government agencies (EPA, DOT, FDA) put a value on a generic human life (currently in the $7.9 to $9.6 million range) for the purpose of assessing costs versus benefits of various actions. Note that this does not account for remaining life expectancy; when the EPA did consider use of a smaller value for older people, it got considerably backlash for that “senior discount”.
But then people are generally squeamish about putting a monetary value on human life anyway. So we get hand waving arguments about the cost of lives to the virus versus the cost to the economy of various mitigation attempts, rather than anyone willing to run the numbers and assess how much cost to the economy is worth it to save some number of lives.
Bloomberg economics columnist Noah Smith wrote, on Twitter:
People asked him whether mid-tier privates would be worse off. He said they would be, but we knew they were in big trouble already.
One reason for your college senior to return to college this fall is to escape with a degree before the bloodbath.
Agree that adjuncts are underpaid but knocking parent’s values for thinking online should cost less might be misplaced. Lots of people have lost jobs or have taken pay cuts so asking higher ed to tighten their belts should be on the table. Colleges market their business and cost based on “the experience”. That piece might gone so some negotiation could be in-order. If colleges want to keep costs the same for online then they need to step-up and make their online presence worthy. I know it sounds crazy that a paying consumer would actually expect more.
It’s tough for me and other parents to sit here and not complain when schools are sitting on $Billions in endowments. I’ve heard all the excuses that they’re earmarked for certain things. If the pandemic doesn’t qualify for opening up the bank a little to improve on-line capabilities, pay adjuncts more, buyout expensive professors, or more FA I’m not sure what does.
The colleges with $Billions in endowments are more likely to be the ones that have additional selling points besides the experience (e.g. prestige). Lots of colleges have neither big endowments nor selling points besides the experience; these colleges will likely be in the most trouble.
Residential college experience isn’t sustainable for most colleges other than those super selective and richly endowed colleges. The signs have been around for a while, certainly before COVID-19. COVID-19 would greatly accelerate this trend. Like it or not, online learning will become increasingly more widespread in higher education even in more normal times.
No, we need more pedantic people… facts matter. All too many folks are throwing around dumb numbers and saying dumb things.
As it is, even pre-COVID the average American college student went in state, to the local state U, increasingly attending a community college first, and working part time at least some of the time. These posh, residential liberal arts colleges set in bucolic parts of the country are going to be as exotic as posh boarding schools.
@AlmostThere2018 thank you very much for posting that article about the different levels of effectiveness based on different materials. My spouse has been using a snood because it’s more comfortable, and look at that rate of effectiveness!!! Will change that immediately.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/13/nation/harvard-medical-school-plans-online-classes-fall/
Harvard Medical School plans online classes in the fall. First year classes will be online, some research and clinical classes may be onsite.