I cynically think it’s an attempt to pacify anxious American parents who don’t understand our Covid response vs. the world’s.
Does the news magazine say which schools they refused offers from in order to stay closer to home?
In son’s small class of approx 45 (a highly selective STEM program within a larger public school) no one turned down HYMPS (well, it’s YMP only this year, but a total of five kids) to stay within the driving distance. MIT reported they had a record yield this year.
OTOH, many kids rejected offers from top publics. Yeah, UMich, GT, UNC, and the like are all great schools, but maybe not 60K/yr great, and there’s little to no merit or need aid. Add the current situation on top of that, and I am guessing their waitlisted applicants may have a good year.
Covid-19 is not a covered condition on tuition insurance…not to mention schools didn’t stop offering classes, so there was no issue with tuition. Of course some feel they were due tuition refunds, not sure I have heard of any schools offering that this spring.
It will be tough for them to require international students to be on campus, or students with underlying conditions.
D19 has a college friends with Crohn’s Disease…he likely won’t be able to go back to school until there is herd immunity, because it’s highly likely he would not be able to get the vaccine.
Agreed. As one of the deans at my research university says: “No one wants to be the president of Coronavirus U.”
@TheVulcan It’s true that we don’t know where all of those kids were accepted. If D was at school, I’m sure she’d be hearing a lot more gossip about that. The numbers really do look odd, though, with three kids to Vandy when we would normally have more like ten. Same for Duke. Same for Northwestern which also makes me think it’s not just distance but cost as well. This year’s class is known as a pretty bright group overall but there are 700 in the class so hard to know details unless I’m out and about and talk to people and, well, you know no one is out and about so there’s little chance to chat.
I do want to emphasize the non-negligible risk of hospitalization for college-aged people who are infected with covid.
Looking at the New York and New Jersey data, and knowing that both states are probably detecting about a tenth of all infections, we can calculate a ballpark risk for 18-29 year olds. Looks like a student infected with covid has about a 1 in 100 chance of being hospitalized with it, and a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying. These are ballpark figures, but they’ll tell you the orders of magnitude involved; might be 1 in 200 and 1 in 20,000. Somewhere around there.
What we can see is that even a small school with a big outbreak is probably going to see students hospitalized. (And remember, a person who is hospitalized for covid is very sick.) A big university with a large outbreak might see a student death, or a few student deaths.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
https://www.nj.gov/health/cd/documents/topics/NCOV/COVID_Confirmed_Case_Summary.pdf
(Warning: these pages don’t tell you exactly what you want to know, if what you want to know is “What is the chance that a college student who is infected with covid will be hospitalized for it?” You have to do some calculation, and make some assumptions about what fraction of cases the states are detecting. Neither page has all the info I wanted. If you’re a numbers geek, play around and see what you can calculate. I’m not a fan of the CDC page. The latest update accounts for ~49,000 deaths; where are the rest of them?)
Note that Hawaii has a state quarantine of 14 days for anyone arriving from out-of-state or from a different island. So anyone attending a college in Hawaii who does not already live on the same island as the college should figure out the logistics of this now.
^Same in Maine.
If students are going to be doing online school from their home, then out of state tuition should be eliminated. It should be same fee for all.
I thought in-state tuition was lower because the state, fundamentally, is using state taxes to support a service for state residents. That is still true for online classes.
Sad to see acceptance decisions influenced by this. I’m not sure what I would do in that case, but I hope that I would stick with 1st choice school as long as possible.
Our Illinois high school also has about twice as many students going to UIUC and UIC than in previous years, as well as about a 30% increase in Illinois State (Bloomington/Normal). We usually have a lot of graduates who choose Iowa, Michigan, Indiana and other OOS public "U"s throughout the midwest but not this year. Still had the handful of kids to HYPMS, about a half dozen each to UChicago and Northwestern. But just so many staying in state after literally years of many going OOS.
Yes, the state still supports instate students from the state budget. It may not be the full difference between instate and OOS students, but it is what the state budget and the school budget thinks is the right distribution. There may also be extra state funds for instate students that the schools know will come to the school, thereby requiring less FA (Hope, Zell Miller, Bright Futures)
Mitch Daniels, the Purdue President was interviewed on CNN yesterday.
He mentioned a few new pieces of information - that 1/3 of the staff will permanently working from home and that profs will be behind plexiglass and socially distanced from students. Students will be required to wear masks and socially distance from each other in the classroom.
I’m feeling good about all the precautions the university is taking. I also trust that they’ll enforce mask wearing and social distancing. The risk will never be 0% to our students. And unfortunately students already die on college campuses every year - suicides, drugs/alcohol, illnesses, accidents, etc…
I’ve already buried one child and I’m very risk adverse about the wellbeing and safety of my living one. That said, C-19 is not on my list of worries for her. Especially with all the enhanced safety measures that are being put in place by the university.
Michigan is beta testing this, this fall but it’s a limited study. They use it for medical dissection and many other things but it’s not wide spread yet.
Interesting article on Niche survey of students about various Fall options
@momofsenior1 – Tks for sharing the Purdue update. And I’m so sorry.
Past HYPMS, the yield dropoff is pretty steep even in the best of times.
For Vandy, it is less than 50% despite their heavy reliance on binding ED.
This year they apparently saw the writing on the wall by admitting 39% more kids RD round.
I don’t think anyone posted this yet - NYT article from yesterday about how several schools have now announced being in-person for fall but no fall break and fall semester over by Thanksgiving https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/us/coronavirus-college-fall-semester.html?