Well I agree that it’s all very regional. But my point is that institutions don’t have complete control over their choices about what education will look like in the fall. I understand the anger and disappointment, but directing it toward the colleges is misguided IMHO.
New letter from MIT President Rafael Reif. While they are gradually bringing some research staff back to the labs, it is looking increasingly unlikely that there will be a normal fall semester on MIT campus:
"The decisions for the fall and beyond involve a large number of interrelated factors and enormous uncertainty – a systems optimization problem that is both MIT-hard and deeply human. Our first priority must be protecting the health and well-being of our community and the many communities we touch, including respecting the needs of those individuals for whom returning to campus before an effective vaccine is broadly in use will pose too great a risk.
One baseline fact is that it is more feasible to bring graduate students back safely because, unlike undergraduates, nearly all live in apartments with private kitchens and baths. They can therefore practice safe distancing without enormous effort.
Relying on current public health advice, and after modelling a wide range of scenarios, it does not appear very likely that we can all be on campus together this fall. Since every available path involves complex trade-offs, each in some way painful or unattractive, we must work through and weigh our choices together.
To help determine the best of the options before us, we are eager to share with you what we have learned so far – and in turn to learn from your input, experiences and ideas."
https://covid19.mit.edu/inviting-you-to-help-chart-our-course
Seems to be a lot of managing of expectatons before the official announcement dates.
Yep, manage expectation and take a step back for some clarity on perspective.
I do not doubt the obstacles confronting MIT opening this fall, I just wonder why Northeastern U is able to overcome them.
Last week Duke University sent out a 12 page report on “Guide for Returning to the Workplace”. While these new policies are geared towards staff you can get a glimpse of health and safety policies that the college is currently putting in place and what students might/can expect if and when they open the campus in the fall. They should be making a decision by July 1.
Below are some key requirements:
- individual symptom monitoring (e.g. cough, fever, chills, etc.) If you have symptoms you have to call the Duke COVID Hotline;
- the phase in of staff over time to meet social distancing requirements;
- staff that can effectively work remotely, can continue to do so until such restrictions are eased for large gatherings;
- if you have been instructed to return to work and have a high risk condition (e.g. chronic lung disease) you can speak with the Disability Management System administrators about accommodations or next steps;
- Face masks MUST be worn by all staff working on campus when in the presence of others or in common areas (an office or other areas without others around seems ok);
- partial (some remote/some in person) staffing and alternate days of work, as needed for departments;
- staggering start and end time of work days to reduce traffic in common areas during peak times;
- Social distancing, 6 feet apart, do not gather in groups of 10+, stay away from crowded places and avoid mass gatherings;
- Housekeeping teams will clean all offices and work spaces per CDC guidelines;
- Building occupants should also wipe down commonly used surfaces, before and after use. **My commentary: The point here is that ALL staff should be doing these things and they/we all have a personal responsibility to clean surfaces we use or intend to use.
- One person per elevator, use stairs whenever possible;
- gatherings/meetings should not exceed 50% of room capacity numbers. Rooms chairs, desks, etc need to be rearranged to make sure the 6 feet distance is maintained;
- Public Transportation/Duke Transit - wear mask, try not to touch anything, wash hands with hand sanitizers after riding the bus;
- Meals - wear a mask when ordering food; eating establishment food lines and seating areas need to be set-up for 6 feet of distancing, do not eat facing each other, staff encouraged to eat outside (if reasonable) or back at their office;
- Signage for traffic flow in buildings, entrances, exits, elevators, and common use areas.
I’m thinking that Duke is really going to do their best effort to bring staff and faculty back on campus in the fall. The campus is huge and spread out. For example, all Freshman live in the dedicated east campus that has their own dorms, dining facilities/marketplace, huge central outdoor grassy quad, large theater, library, other facilities, buildings and classrooms. This configuration MAY be its saving grace as it would be a way to “isolate”, test and trace a quarter of the undergrads and limit their movements on the main west campus, if they deem it necessary. They only 1,800 freshman and 6,700 undergrads but they do have 9,000 graduate and professional students.
They also have more money than most other colleges to buy the necessary health equipment, testing sites, PPE, to build and maintain quarantine areas, hire contact trace workers, etc, to make this work?
Very curious to see what they can (or want to) pull off this academic year.
Hiya. I went only to rich-kid postsecondary schools until I came to State U. and was very pleasantly surprised. The landscaping game was notably weak, but you couldn’t beat the value. 20 years’ worth of budget cuts and growing national/global inequality have knocked the place down pretty hard, but the professor factories are still the same professor factories, and you find their products all over. Here, too.
If you think I’m insulted by the rigor remark…well, I mean it’s true. In the mass classes. It has to be. Some of the kids who show up here can barely read. It doesn’t mean they’re ineducable, only that they had terrible educations. Some know it, some don’t. Others genuinely have no time to go to school, but must. They’re taking care of kids, parents, extended families, working fulltime while trying to take full courseloads. Am I going to punish them for falling asleep in class? No. I’m going to help them out, teach them what they’ve got bandwidth to learn, and lift the rope for them.
But it’s a big tent. We also get kids who got into much better schools and couldn’t afford to go. Kids who present as hotshot grad students at age 19. So at all these schools there are mechanisms and networks for recognizing and rescuing these kids and trying to get them onto the tracks where they belong. We send them off to competitive med schools, grad schools, law schools, the usual. Fulbrights, all that.
And in the vast middle? Many are kids buying four years of party and/or a ticket to employment, nothing more. Some find the courses mildly interesting, improving. Which is nice. Some learn something, some don’t. Some, if they’d grown up in certain suburbs, would be at expensive mid-tier schools with much better networking and hair products, but they didn’t have that kind of money, career-competition training, and attention pumped into them, so they’re here and happy about it, in general. Without all this middle and the football parents paying tuition and giving money, there’s nothing for the kids at either end. I have no complaints about the vast middle.
There are tippy-top schools that are not rivalled by ed you can find, if you’re lucky or enterprising, at Big State U. You will not find MIT’s freshman classes there: that kind of depth isn’t offered. There are a few others. But on the whole, what you’re buying at the elites isn’t intellectual adventure. You’re buying concierge service, useful handshakes, comportment training, induction. There’s a significant charm-school factor, and those places lay their fingerprints all over the kids: 20, 30, 40 years later they still sniff each other out, rank each other by undergrad institution. (Careful how you sling that Yale, that’s a room-temp dropper. I remember a recent Smith grad I met maybe ten years ago who was excruciating about it – she was aware of the name’s effect, so she kept saying “my undergraduate institution” instead.) What they don’t tell you up front is that unless you have the cash to keep up with that crowd after graduation, that training’s utility is strictly limited.
I hope I’m not just insulting you further, but you should know what you’re buying. As for how the campus break will affect all this, it’s all in A Separate Peace. It’ll make your kid Interesting and Brave to younger alumni, and if the school’s small enough – Bowdoin is – in a few decades there’ll be interview requests from current students. It’s shocking how little changes, some ways.
So interesting and sometimes perplexing to hear the different leading scenarios for schools. Take Northeastern and Williams for example. Both in the very hard hit state of MA. Northeastern with 15,000 students on a campus with a small footprint (less than 80 acres) and situated in the Covid hot zone of MA has committed to students on campus in the fall. Williams with only 2,100 students on almost 500 acres in a remote part of the state not so hard hit by Covid seems to be leaning toward no students on campus for fall. You would think the situation for the schools would be the reverse.
MIT may be more conservative in terms of how it considers health risks than Northeastern. Just like how some people will go to a crowded bar as soon as it is open, while others will wait until a vaccine, different colleges may choose differently when presented with similar conditions.
And people (colleges) who live paycheck-to-paycheck (tuition payment to tuition payment) will go out to work as soon as it is allowed, while others with a fat bank account (endowment) who have their pick of job opportunities (students) may choose differently when presented with similar conditions.
They are 2 miles apart. Literally.
I raised this as a possibility for schools several hundred posts back and I still think it’s an interesting possibility. The primary roadblock schools are encountering is density. Graduate student populations are IMO the easiest to manage in this regard. With undergrads you have to cope with high density, shared baths and dining facilities.
Some of Stanford’s communications have hinted at this as well, but they have a little more time to plan since they are on a quarter system, typically starting the fall quarter in late September .
Two miles and sixteen billion dollars.
Yes, and it is the wealthy one that won’t open. No need to, I guess, although they could afford plenty of tests, etc.
At this point we do not know whether Northeastern “is able to overcome them” because the future has not happened yet.
But a mid-tier expensive private without much of a financial cushion like Northeastern might also be a little more desperate, and thus prone to taking a gamble, than MIT that had a record yield this year and is not in an immediate financial peril.
From the looks of it MIT will be choosing between partial on-campus rotation and a full online semester/year for undergrads.
I feel like I would prefer full online at this point.
Research schools need to research. That’s why having grad students back on campus makes sense.
@wisteria100 wrote:
I’ve been wondering about this. Williams may not have the housing stock necessary to serve as quarantine quarters. It’s built for 2,000 healthy students and Billtown is not known for its vast amounts of of-campus housing.
Schools like MIT can afford to make decisions more balanced between the needs of various groups. They don’t have to worry about students taking gap years or leaves of absence, transferring to other institutions, etc. Northeastern isn’t in that category, and there’s a decent chance that it may not be able to keep its promise in this regard anyway.
Boston University is also planning for an on campus fall semester. The media just hasn’t covered it to the extent that they have covered Northeastern.