In the case of Bowdoin, that usually has no kids off campus, kids now looking to live “off campus” don’t have to be in Brunswick. They aren’t allowed on campus so it won’t matter where they live. Might live in Portland. And I doubt freshmen, who have no connections at all to upperclassmen, would go to any parties they are having. There’s not going to be this giant influx of off-campus Bowdoin students in Bruswick. There’s not a lot of available housing. This option is really to just gain back a few things about college life - being with their friends and learning to live independently. I don’t think many will choose it.
This is really uncharted territory for these kids who chose a school where they knew they had housing for four years. It’s one of the reasons that kids choose LACs. Ugh.
I like following the science. Hot off the press today is new Italian research and physician observations that they are seeing a much less virulent strain of covid currently in patients. Even among the elderly. Those who would have been fatal are getting better in a few days. Microscopically they detect mutation. I think the comparison they used was a February strain like a tiger and what they are seeing now is much more tame.
Hope it’s a trend we see.
Looking at case counts only is flawed according to Dr Fauci. Fatalities and hospitalization are the keys to watch.
That’s why the complete shutdown by a school at this point seems to be overdone. But decisions need to be made. I hope it isn’t institutional virtue signaling as though some “care” more than others as has been posited here. Which is just a different type of slice from the same superiority pie.
I wouldn’t want to to have to root for death and illness to prove my point of view. I’d rather just be wrong and admit it later. Unfortunately we have young adults in the middle who won’t get these years back no matter how much we rationalize things. Fatal. No. Tragic. Not really. Very Sad. Certainly.
It wouldn’t be quite so sad for the kids in the middle of the pack, say the incoming sophomores and juniors, if they could take a gap year and get back on track for fall 2021. Yeah, a year of finding stuff to do but it seems like more options might be opening up for that. But the kicker is not knowing if your student can return and that seems to be the policy for Harvard too.
The Swarthmore/Penn model of covid spread on campus, reported in Inside Higher Ed and linked upthread, is stark.
According to the model, a 20,000 student college would have a 95% chance of reducing total infections to 66 students IF
Every student refrained from all contact with other students, except their their classmates in academic settings and their roommates
Every student and every professor wore masks at all times when they were with other people, even with social distancing AND
Every day, 3% of the student/faculty population was tested; contact tracing was done; infected people and their contacts were isolated AND
Classes bigger than 30 students were moved online
Even in this fantasy setting, with extreme testing, no parties, no in-person clubs, no sports, not even sports with no fans in attendance, the model shows a 5% chance of an outbreak.
@circuitrider All of the NESCAC college presidents have frequently been talking with one another. I don’t think this is going to change anything; I think the other presidents already knew this is what Bowdoin was planning to do. They haven’t been making these decisions completely independent of one another.
I’d call it the Stanford model: all returning students in singles on campus with only a portion of students return to campus. Stanford is the first to announce such a model (with some aspects perhaps unique to its own situation).
There will be virus. It’s just how contained and how virulent. I don’t think anyone thinks we can create a virus bubble on campus. More that the students really aren’t at risk and how do we keep them from infecting those who may be at risk.
The concept of no virus is a strawman as much as no socializing.
@1NJParent Not really; Stanford is letting all students come back for two out of three trimesters this year to do in-person classes with their class year; only one trimester online.
The study is based on an earlier study that Cornell researchers conducted using Cornell’s spring 2015 course enrollment.
I think we were a little bit surprised about how tight the connections really are, what a small world it really is, and in particular that there are so many different paths between any two students. It’s not just one student who is connecting any given pair of students. It’s multiple ways that you can get to student A or student B. Even if they’re not taking a class together, they’re likely taking it with a third person that they share in common. One of the lessons is that university administrators may need to think creatively about what’s going on in their local context. Our study was just Cornell, and all universities, even those of fairly similar size, are structured a little bit differently."
WVU OOS does have a higher list price than PSU in-state, but PSU is notoriously stingy with FA and scholarships, while a student who can get admitted to PSU (main) is likely to get a significant scholarship from WVU.
I think it was Reuter’s. But here’s something similar. He the Chief of infectious disease at a Genoa Hospital and a Professor. But others disagree with him strongly in other countries. Which is the right thing to do and they should investigate all of this science thoroughly good and bad. As I stated above.
it’s at least something that would be potentially positive as I stated. It’s also anecdotal where I live. Hearing about people I know who have tested positive and being ok. My sisters nursing homes she works at in a medical capacity has seen a steady number of cases and less fatalities as of late. Pure anecdote though.
Slight correction: they’re extending from 3 quarters to 4, working on the hope that most students will have a chance to be on campus 2 of the 4 quarters. Most classes likely will be online, including for those on campus. Important to note that this is their current planning model, not a guarantee of how things will look. Much depends on Santa Clara County regulations and conditions, as well as the ability to implement effective testing and tracing (not a given).
Probably also because most PhD students do not have as many or as large classes as undergraduate or professional school students (the exception being those who are TAs), so their number of contacts is more controlled.
This may be an example of acronym creep. Harvard and MIT have made rather loud noises about only returning a portion of their student bodies and to a largely online learning experience. Someone upstream beamed in to suggest that HYPMS, as a whole, represented such a strangle-hold on the prestige college imagination that they alone could get away with such a scenario and not suffer a significant loss of market share. Well, Bowdoin may prove @TheVulcan - cough, - I mean, that person - wrong.
For the record, Yale has been extremely cagey with its pronouncements, making the usual bows to an early beginning and Thanksgiving end to classes, but, no hints about what actual campus life will be like. Expansion space is the issue for all five of them. I suspect the Bulldogs are looking very closely at kicking the law students out of their newly renovated digs and using them for quarantine purposes.
The key differentiating factor isn’t how many students or even how frequently they’d return to campus. All schools adopting such model will tweak the numbers based on their own circumstances. What differentiate the model with others are 1) partial return, and 2) students in singles.
Yale sent another note to students at noon today but it didn’t say anything new. Perhaps prompted by the article in the student newspaper that leaked possible plans.
There was also a rumor that Yale was in conversation with the two large hotels in town, but no clue if that is anything more than a rumor.
Student rumor mill has First Years and seniors returning. TBD.
