I agree. We are not giving these schools and their students enough credit. It will not look the same. Change is hard, but we can adapt. The motivation is there. Colleges and K-12 have tasted online school. Most say “no thank you”.
I know my S20 has said that he will absolutely comply with whatever rules or conditions ND puts in place.
@GMGiant wrote
I admit I haven’t read the whole thread, but what’s wrong with sociologists?
Very interesting and salient piece in today’s NY Times. The University of Kentucky permitted a NY Times reporter to listen in on discussions among university leaders on their plans to reopen this fall.
Fever Checks and Quarantine Dorms: What Fall College Could Look Like
We listened as University of Kentucky administrators discussed bringing students back to campus, providing a glimpse into what other schools might do in the fall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/us/college-fall-2020-coronavirus.html
So if adjuncts/instructors are gone & tenured profs/grad students are required to cover all undergrad classes, what happens to grants? I’m thinking of labs where all profs & grad students are fully grant funded, rarely/never teach, plus contribute to admin budgets. If they shut down research, or significantly decrease, to teach full time instead, do they keep the grant money? If not, how would the University fund them since they are more expensive than adjuncts?
Right now I think it is easy for students to promise whatever they must to get back on campus but once there I predict overtime students will become lax or downright bristle at continuing to social distance, wear masks, etc. In our area, I am watching parents hosting proms at home for their children and their friends well over the 10 person limit and everyone hugging in each photo and happily uploading the photos to social media. All of these students in these photos are college-bound to schools both in state and across the country. Do I predict a huge change in behavior as soon as they arrive? No, I do not.
If adults are struggling to maintain social distancing and all necessary precautions (masks, etc) after two months how will college students be handling the same challenge in early November? Does anyone foresee students not having parties (perhaps smaller but still), wearing a mask when closer than six feet (except with those they live with), and attempting to stay six feet away whenever possible?
I hope students surprise me with their consideration of others’ health. I know at this moment I am saddened by so many well-educated adults who are choosing not to be.
Regarding governor performance. I believe it was CNN who conducted a survey for approval ratings of how govs were handling the crisis. CA and NY governors were the highest at about 80% approval. GA and the President lagged far behind
And on the topic of mental health as it relates to students missing school, which @ChemAM brought up and got blasted for, NPR has a piece with a Dr advocating for re-opening schools for this very reason - mental health issues and suicide risk.
And I am waiting for a flood of news of deaths that could have been prevented but weren’t because routine Dr appointments are way down, preventative screenings are not happening, people experiencing heart pain are not calling 911, children are missing routine vaccinations, domestic violence incidents way up etc.
We absolutely have to protect the vulnerable from Covid, but also need to make sure those protections are not endangering others.
Bowdoin has been very open about the sausage making going on to get to a realistic fall plan. Last week’s 90 minute town hall was nothing but explaining how they’ve been gathering knowledge, what they’ve been considering (for academics, for athletics, for residential life, for clubs, for dining, etc.), options they’ve considered but tabled (and why), and the options still being considered. It’s not like there’s five people sitting around thinking, “hm we are going to need a lot of testing and I wonder where we will find more housing”. These committees have been committed to developing plan for weeks now.
I know a lot of schools aren’t saying much and just posting a letter or two here and there with updates sans details but that does not mean they are not working on it. Lots of schools have reported that they have multiple committees planning right now. Some websites list the names of the people on these committees. Check your student’s college’s coronovirus website. There might be more details there.
This all being said, I do believe each school will choose a plan, announce it when it makes sense for them, and then move ahead with putting that plan in place. ND likely felt they needed to make their decision now because they want to start early and students need that info and the school needs to start moving on setting up campus for that plan. Now, if things take a turn for the worse in early August, there’s always a chance that colleges will have to pull their plans and go all remote. That’s why they are all planning remote versions of their classes as well. They need to be flexible.
So it’s okay to put the lives of the older family members (and young children) of campus employees in danger? It’s not the staff’s job to take care of a ward of highly contagious people who are carrying a deadly disease.
@austinmshauri Faculty will have the choice of coming back to teach; many other employees can socially distance. And essential employees can social distance from students and wear surgical masks while working. Equating doing their jobs to maintain the campus as “tak[ing] care of a ward of highly contagious people who are carrying a deadly disease” is a stretch. That is different because there is not anywhere near as much people, and faculty and staff can socially distance from students to a much greater extent than family members can. Also, the job of faculty and staff is to continue operations of the university.
There are some on this thread who just seem dead again college opening in the fall. What do you see as the alternative and when does that plan end? Students stay home and class online? Until what happens? This is what confuses me. Do these same people think the economy should stay shut down as well? K-12? Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t want to be political but I will say I am definitely not conservative and I’m not out there yelling about my civil liberties. I just want a smart plan based on as much science as we can muster to get people back to school and work. It won’t be “normal” but it’s better than the alternative of doing what we are all doing right now. T
@ChemAM wrote:
I would include the words, “safely and with the highest precautions reasonably possible.”
Taking care of sick students on campus has negative economic repercussions (need of additional space and staff are extra costs) and potentially significant negative health consequences to the immediate and wider local community.
Expensive and potentially deadly. Lose - lose situation. imo
Every few days I read, again, about the course of the 1918 pandemic. It got worse before it got better.
If 1918 is the model, I don’t think " normal" exists for at least two years.
Colleges need to develop the best plans that they can based on their location, infrastructure, funding, and expertise. Then everyone - college administrators, employees, and students should look at the plan and make their own informed decisions. Everyone should assume the attitude of Twitter when they discussed opening their offices: “Opening offices will be our decision, when and if our employees come back, will be theirs”.
No schools is going to be 100% successful in this and we should not hold them to an unrealistically high bar. Man plans, and God laughs.
France reopened some of its schools last week.
Several have now been shut down again after a spike in 70 new cases. CNN reports 70 schools have shut down again, but I think that’s incorrect.
Anyway, instead of speculating about shutdowns/spikes, we should be following what’s going on in France, Germany, Spain and Italy – nations with significant Covid cases – since they’re considering or slowly reopening K-12. I know that K-12 is different from higher education, but it is an indication of what may be happening here.
From History.com:
Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course. In retrospect, it was only the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutated strain of the Spanish flu virus had emerged that had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection.
In late August 1918, military ships departed the English port city of Plymouth carrying troops unknowingly infected with this new, far deadlier strain of Spanish flu. As these ships arrived in cities like Brest in France, Boston in the United States and Freetown in west Africa, the second wave of the global pandemic began.
“The rapid movement of soldiers around the globe was a major spreader of the disease,” says James Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies both infectious disease and World War I. “The entire military industrial complex of moving lots of men and material in crowded conditions was certainly a huge contributing factor in the ways the pandemic spread.”
I have to wonder if we are overestimating how bad a second wave could be. We will not have the above situation here. No one is going abroad, catching a worse strain, and then spreading it all over the states.
But, @homerdog , TBH, you really haven’t made the case for why flying your kid across the country in order for him to live away from home for the first time in 17 years is crucial to the opening of the economy?
At least some students fly to college, and through international airports. If there is a worse strain, it will spread easily.
Again… jmo
It’s been fascinating to observe, on many levels. Northeastern famously announced a campus reopening, saying they secured 2,000 beds to spread out their on-campus housing. Northeastern is in central Boston… where did NEU get those extra 2,000 beds? My hunch is students will be spread out throughout the city, many likely not terribly close to their campus. So much for that valued residential campus experience…
Schools are also scrambling to come up with a prospective class given the probable loss of tens of thousands international students. Suddenly, being a transfer student has gotten a lot easier. A friend’s son is applying to transfer to half a dozen selective schools, and that’s been interesting to watch.
Some of the schools that in the past that would have taken until June or July to send their decisions turned around his application in a matter of 10 working days or less. Some gave him a couple of weeks to decide. Others wanted a pretty much immediate response – NYU gave him 5 days to accept.
You can practically feel the tension in the admissions office.
@circuitrider Well, he’s 19 and an rising sophomore not a freshman. He wants to go back to school if possible and resume his life. Who has a student at home who wants to stay there and take more online classes from their childhood bedroom? I never said sending my son back to school is crucial to the opening of the economy but how is opening colleges (which is part of the economy) different than opening restaurants? Because kids could choose to stay home and still learn? I’m too tired to get into that debate again. Much of what kids learn in college isn’t in the classroom. Can’t get it in his bedroom.
I believe schools need more time before reopening. I think right now they are working with limited information and pressing time constraints. I believe they need time to really get a good working model and I do not believe that involves all students on campus in the fall.
Opening schools up to graduate students first makes a lot of sense to me. It gives schools a trial run with students who are older and often live off-campus. They can use that data to see what works or doesn’t. They have time to gather all supplies needed (PPE, extra dorms for quartine, take out boxes of dining halls are to go style, etc). Also, even a few extra months before opening campuses up to all allows science to work on treatments that help to mitigate the virus.
I do not think schools need to be shut down for the next two years. I do, however, believe that a “soft opening” to work out the kinks seems wise. Start with graduate students or seniors and work down from there.
Things might look better in January or much worse but the schools will have more data on how operations will need to shift. If things are much worse in January schools will likely switch to remote learning, if they are better (or they have more tools to use in mitigation) they can invite more students to return to campus.