@Knowsstuff Brunswick has very little housing available. People have resorted to looking at AirBnbs. It’s not like Ann Arbor. Kids live on campus all fours years except for maybe a small handful senior year who may find a house. One of the reasons S19 liked LACs is because he wouldn’t have to live off campus, be searching for apartments, and making his own food!
@homerdog I wholeheartedly agree with you. Bowdoin should be allowing unlimited leaves of absence without penalty and they should have to deal with the financial and logistical consequences, since they opted not to reopen campus. They’re rich, they can figure it out.
@ChemAM I think that decision will not be left up to them. It will be made at the local/state level. That is what happened at UMD last year. Went home for Spring break and then not allowed back. Also, UMD has stated that all classes over 50 students will be online and many classes under 50 will be online unless they are: Capstone, performance, lab, or clinical. So to me that means most classes are going to be online anyway.
The public school here did bring the band back for practice outside. Parents say it worked out.
What I find really discouraging is there is no guarantee things will be better in Fall 2021, or maybe even Fall 2022. I suppose at some point colleges will decide they have to be in person or online for the foreseeable future, and students will act accordingly.
I know! Put the kids up in …YURTS!
[ducks and runs]
(Some well intentioned levity, for those who remember the forever running “stupidest reasons to rule out a school” thread. Not meaning to make light of the real dilemmas kids face here. If you’re not up to humour right now, I’m sorry and please ignore…)
@austinmshauri so what do you suggest then? How does one consider a gap when it could be a year, or a year and a half, or two years! That is an impossible decision. Love to hear your thought process on how you would do it.
My D would totally live in a yurt!
Disappointment comes when expectations do not align with reality.
Around mid-February I began sharing with our kids my growing suspicions that the high-stakes national academic competitions they were building up to for years may get cancelled. When that ultimately happened, they were prepared.
Similarly, as far back as March I’ve been telling our elder (and people on CC) that his freshman year may begin from his bedroom. Is he happy about it? No. But he is ready even before the official plans roll down.
With so many on this thread displaying unrealistic expectations over the past few months, I have to assume they did not counsel their kids to begin adjusting theirs.
No wonder the disappointment level on hearing “surprising” decisions is running high.
I love yurts. In summer! Not sure how I’d feel about them in coastal Maine in November. But the kids who survive would be healthy as a horse!
Uh-oh. Sounds as if you can add Wesleyan to the “uncertain” list. This was posted on the alum listserv last night by a friend of mine from the Bay Area:
IMHO, something has stirred the pot within NESCAC recently; perhaps it is the news coming out of the Sun Belt where they recruit heavily; perhaps, it is the growing realization that a 1% infection rate among even healthy college students is patently unrealistic. For whatever reason, the Bowdoin decision may be the tip of the iceberg.
Interestingly, the alumni experts the Wesleyan president referred to would have to include Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA chief, who is a frequent guest expert on the Sunday morning shows. I’ve watched him and he’s like a younger version of Dr. Fauci. Very no-nonesense and sobering.
It’s good to know that Hamilton and Amherst are constructing outdoor buildings of some sort; they will probably come in handy no matter what they decide in the coming weeks. But, IMO, nothing’s written in stone.
Schools seem to be in a no win situation. If you wait to announce plans (because fall is 2 months away and situations are changing weekly if not daily), that isn’t good/fair because kids/families need to plans. Announce plans now and people suggest you are just making financial decisions and expect those plans will need to change in the fall. Or some people won’t like the choice of any given school (how do you please everyone?).
A whole lot of uncertainty. Advanced planning required for classes, living, dining, etc. Can’t turn on a dime or announce plans today and implement tomorrow. All with a moving target. Patience and flexibility will be required. Of all parties. Not easy given whats at stake.
@homerdog - I think gap years are really not something universities truly want to promote. It feels to me like they are intentionally making it not an attractive options so most students will opt to pay tuition and do their semester online.
It is not as if the decisions are consistent in any way, even among similar schools, so it is rather hard to prepare for an outcome that could differ radically from peer schools. Students at Middlebury overlap in type with those at Bowdoin but will have very different experiences. For those schools which have not yet announced, should we anticipate an approach like Duke, or like Stanford, or like Harvard?
@TheVulcan S19 and all Bowdoin kids were caught off guard by Bowdoin’s decision. The president didn’t even choose any of the options offered by the committees he put together to research going back to school. So, were they prepared? No. They were prepared for wearing masks, social distancing, remote classes from their rooms, no sports. But not this. It’s not a matter of parents not preparing our kids. We also never thought they’d do this.
@circuitrider so what has Wesleyan officially said so far?
@homerdog http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2020/06/22/wesleyan-announces-initial-plans-to-reactivate-campus-in-the-fall/
It would be helpful if schools were more upfront about the criteria required for reopening. If they are waiting for a vaccine, I think we should expect many years of online instruction. If they are waiting for cases to reach a certain level, say so.
There seems to be a lot of resistance to online learning. I have taken many online classes (in my 50’s and later) and loved them. At my university, online classes cost MORE.
A large portion of college students are “non-traditional” and already do college online. Their education is equal to that of students on campus, but an online education allows them to work (Pre-COVID), be with kids and so on. Does anyone still think that this “non-traditional” majority is getting an education that isn’t valid?
The potential of online classes was not utilized when schools shut down on an emergency basis. They can be excellent.
One of my kids teaches at a university and has done enormous amounts of work recently learning how to teach optimal online classes and there is also an enormous amount of work preparing, including creating slides, finding YouTube and other links, and figuring out ways to make the class interesting on Zoom. Generally Canvas and Blackboard are also used. There are plenty of ways to interact, discuss, get mentoring in office hours, do independent and small group work.
I would add that many faculty members have health issues and need to be safe, as well as the students. Online classes accomplish that.
Anyway, I think the real issue here is not missing out on education. It is about losing out on social and extracurricular activities.
I know kids with medical or psychiatric issues who have taken medical leaves, sometimes more than one, and watched while peers graduated. At least everyone is in this together. And I also know that for those kids who had leaves and were left behind when peers graduated, the whole experience is a blip now, many years later.
I am sorry for the grief people are feeling but I think parents need to avoid feeling it themselves. I used to tell my kids that when they are struggling in the water, I need to stay in the boat, or we both will drown.
Online classes are fine. Things will be okay in time. This is not the experience anyone expected or wanted, even months ago, but it is not one that people can’t cope with.
Yes yes, very much so, every word!. Since my kiddo came back early March, we told her to bring everything home, and expected to be here until the end of the year. We expected school to be on line in the fall, even way back then. Anything more than that would be a nice surprise. Since then we decided that she will live at an off campus apartment in the fall regardless.
Now looks like she will have discussions and labs in person, and maybe 1 in person lecture out of 5. And she lives off campus so the on campus rules don’t apply to her, although she would be okay with those rules anyway. She is quite happy with the outcome overall.
Earlier this thread, some criticized the big public schools’ decisions and implied that they were too big or too poor to care…Now with more decisions coming out, the “big public schools” look pretty good now in comparison. It’s all about the expectation.
Also, perspective makes a huge difference - the students at Cal would be so happy to just have their elevator stays working for the entire month without breaking down, or that they the line to the dining hall was’t too long they wouldn’t miss their meal, or that they could get in to most of their classes. Those things other (LAC) kids take for granted. So, taking the classes online isn’t that big of a deal to many of them, it’s really not the end of the world, it doesn’t “ruin” their college experience. At the end of the day, Cal has amazing professors with amazing teaching materials. Honestly they are THE MOST important things to many of the students at Cal. God knows I tried to talk her out of picking this school, but now I am quietly happy that she did.