My position unchanged. BTW, all these students that gotta party…are they part of the solution or the problem?
Can we leave the moral judgements out of this thread? Its bad enough on the other thread. Each school is doing what it feels is best, given its set of circumstances. No decision is good or bad, caring or uncaring, selfish or non-selfish. No one here was sitting in the meeting where the decision was made and therefore no one knows exactly what the discussion was and why the decision was made.
The link here is from Inside Higher Ed and summarizes a new and eye-opening simulation study of Covid risk at colleges and universities this fall: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/22/working-paper-models-covid-spread-university?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c6b2cc9f1e-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c6b2cc9f1e-236525990&mc_cid=c6b2cc9f1e&mc_eid=7bb7639984
^^Fascinating^
It could be Bowdoin’s discussions with the local and state health department or the unique layout of the campus and buildings, or it could be they weighed the likelihood of closing and decided it was likely.
I don’t second guess Bowdoin’s decision to be mostly online as much as their peer’s decision to be open.
ETA: it also could be there weren’t enough beds to be found or they decided the high tuition for online classes saved their budget.
Very helpful, and promising, I’d say:
The model examines a hypothetical large university of 20,000 students and 2,500 instructors who interact daily for 100 days. The mean class size in the simulation is 24 students, with 90 percent of classes having 50 students or fewer.
Each day in the model, there is a 25 percent chance that one individual on campus not in quarantine, who has not already been infected, can become spontaneously infected by nonuniversity contact, a rate researchers said was rather low compared to other estimates.
In the absence of any intervention at all, the model suggests that all susceptible community members would acquire COVID-19 by the end of the semester, with peak infection rates between 20 and 40 days into the semester, even if the semester begins with no infections.
A standard intervention, consisting of quarantine, contact tracing, universal mask wearing, daily testing of 3 percent of the university population and large classes (30 or more students) moved online, suggests a slightly rosier picture, with infections kept below 66 people in 95 percent of simulations.
66 people out of 20,000 students using the methods that have been mentioned by many colleges. With an improvement in testing (and hopefully tracing apps that will be mandatory), those numbers will even be better.
@me29034 Those posts aren’t moral judgements IMO they are opinion and observation. Each school is doing what it believes is best and communicating it’s plans. I am not of the opinion that all plans are sound. Again, those are my opinions. I leave the judgement up to the parents and students of the school. To use an old phrase from Texas: “I don’t have a dog in that fight”.
When it comes to Stanford - I’ll judge their plan when it comes out in it’s entirely (I do have a dog in that fight). But, for right now, I’m OK with what I’ve heard.
These are scary, frustrating times. This website provides students and parents the opportunity to share ideas, express frustrations, and support one another and I am grateful for this opportunity. As someone else wrote earlier, there is no right or wrong answer for how schools handle this truly unprecedented situation. So, as we all negotiate these times, lets listen to, share with, and support each other.
This is great and the tweaking of the model is what I’m hearing is going on behind the scenes here in Colorado. “Pull this lever we get this bump to the economy and this number of new cases. Add these safety measures and we get…”
but what if there is a bunch of raging parties? 
Although I prefer how Amherst is handling gap years (unlimited, return at any time although on-campus housing not guaranteed), I don’t understand what would be the basis of a lawsuit? Private school, their enrollment rules, no?
The CSUs in California also prioritize undergraduate education, and are not considered high-research universities. But they made the decision early on to be primarily online this fall.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they value undergrad education, but they value other things more, like graduate education, at Stanford and Harvard, for example. Hence those graduate students are prioritized for return immediately (but not necessarily professional certification students).
Obviously anyone can file a lawsuit, but I don’t see grounds for a successful lawsuit. The seniors might have a case because $56k tuition for an online education is laughable and they don’t have real options to transfer without losing a lot of credits.
The basis of the lawsuit is they are charging the same amount for a different product than the one they signed on for and they are not being given the opportunity to back out. It’s the marketing that’s the issue.
It might be interesting to know how many returning graduate students are:
1)teaching in what many on this thread would consider a necessary role for undergraduate classes
- doing what most of us would consider essential research in labs, the good for humanity type research, including perhaps covid related work.
Neither is a prerequisite to their return to campus at Harvard, for example. So 5k will be back regardless of their need for any labs or teaching.
It is likely that most answers will be seen as “wrong” (restrictions to prevent spread of the virus either too strict or too lenient) by at least some large subset of people who have an interest in the matter (not necessarily the same subset of people for each possible answer that a college may choose). For most colleges, there may be no answers that are widely seen as the “right” answers.
But they are giving the opportunity to back out by allowing unlimited gap years, even though at least right now, return isn’t guaranteed in the semester the student wants. And rising sophs and juniors still have the option to transfer.
I agree with alwaysmoving that anyone can sue for any reason, but this does not sound like the basis for a successful lawsuit.
Do you think the schools that aren’t allowing any gap years are leaving themselves open to a lawsuit?
That’s what I was thinking too. This is interesting and promising data but it all assumes the kids are social distancing outside of the classroom. But at least it gives the schools a possible model for follow in regards to how to manage their classes.