A friend.’s kid goes to Ursinus College - about 1800 students.
Freshman returning 8/20 and the rest of students 9/7.
On campus until Thanksgiving etc. in person and online classes, evenings.
Encouraging students to not leave campus.
Also, if you test positive and live within 300 miles you must quarantine at home.
A bar right off UCF’s campus just had 152 cases tied to it from 1 night. They are still planning on opening. They will have an app for tracing. They have over 8,000 living in on campus housing. It’s going to be a mess.
Our S19 has been doing remote classes in Tokyo since mid-March, and it’s been challenging but fine. Nine a.m. in Ohio is 10 p.m. here, so, yes, many of the classes have been in the middle of the night, but he got used to it and even signed up for a summer internship that started every evening at 11 p.m. That’s going to wind up tomorrow, and he’ll be happy to go back to a more normal schedule, but overall I think it was a good experience. He learned how to pace himself, nap when necessary, etc. He only missed one class, when he got the dates mixed up - Wednesday in the US is already Thursday here. His professors at Denison have generally done a great job - lots of different teaching models depending on the teacher’s personality and style. He’s happy they’ll be going back in August, but he was mentally prepared to continue with remote learning and he would have been OK with that. It’s really the sports that can’t be managed online!
I keep waiting for my son’s school to announce plans of how they are going to deal with the virus and so far there is very little. They moved the start of the semester forward a week and will end at Thanksgiving, they announced dorm move in dates and said no upperclassmen need to change their selected rooms, and that’s about it. Still nothing on testing - either on arrival or ongoing, nothing about classrooms being rearranged, nothing about quarantining sick students or contact tracing. I just don’t get it. Maybe they are waiting to see how everyone else’s announcements go over before saying anything? Its very frustrating. My parents group is all la-di-da as if its all going to be normal. People are currently asking when parents weekend is this year and who is going.
This seems like a bad idea.
@jeneric --Those stats on the UCF bar are a little off…there was a cluster of 152 cases tied to the area around UCF but not from one bar on one night. The bar–Knights Pub-- had 13 employees and 23 guests test positive from the weekend they opened. The bar was shut down and their liquor license pulled. Investigated because they posted photos on their FB showing college age kids shoulder to shoulder doing shots with the caption “We’re Back!!” BUT…your point is well taken. It’s going to be a mess because 18-25 year olds are still going to gather…party…and socialize not matter where they are or how smart or how enlightened they are. UCF’s plan made me laugh–“there will be hand sanitizer and wipes in each classroom.” Sigh…
So people throwing lots of shade for places like Bowdoin but we are already seeing colleges with cases or universities seemingly giving up like UofSC’s president. Can’t wait to see if the “happy medium” works with the schools that have lots of virus protocols. I think it might work in some cases depending on the location but my guess is that most classes will end up remote and then being on campus (for those in housing anyway) will be a waste of room and board.
Colgate announced this morning via a video statement from President Casey that the plan is to open in the fall for all students; full plan to be released later today.
I’ll bet that the majority of Ursinus students live within 300 miles. This requirement means they can reduce the amount of quarantine space. But 300 miles can be a 6 hour car ride. So mom or dad are supposed to drive to the school, pick up the sick kid and drive home. How are mom or dad not going to get infected during 6 hours at close quarters? What if kid needs to use a restroom on the way home?
@suzyQ7 “Honestly - I’m sure all your kids are happy sunshine and all that, but mine is still disappointed with a loss of senior spring (did you know, they lost EVERYTHING?) and is ready to live on her own.” I read the sarcasm/joke.
I’m definitely feeling the “So are we.” part here, too. But our youngest hasn’t even graduated hs. If school goes online again this year we will probably want to find him some where else to live (maybe, a yurt in the back yard?)
I need to add that anyone “directly exposed“ to someone who tested positive will also be asked to leave campus.
@homerdog wrote:
Being asymptomatic doesn’t always guarantee you are detectable within the first 48 hours of infection. You would have to test kids seven days a week to catch all the asymptomatics.
TBH, if I were a Bowdoin official lurking this board the past two months and thought for a minute that every family was expecting 0% infections and the absolute minimum mitigation it could get away with, I’d close two-thirds of the college too. I wonder what sorts of feedback the presidents of Wesleyan, Williams and Amherst (okay, not Amherst), the Claremont Colleges, Swarthmore, etc. are getting?
Huh? That so doesn’t make sense. Some students could go back and forth to home multiple times under that scenario.
I don’t understand why schools aren’t working with infectious disease experts to make these decisions/plans…it’s not reasonable to expect that profs/staff/students on a committee can create a plan that makes sense.
It’s similar to the reaction I had to Bowdoin’s announcement that they will be testing all students on campus twice every week. That could make sense initially, but after that, don’t they know there are validated models that will tell a school how many students have to be randomly tested every week to ensure they are identifying cases? And that is typically something far less than testing 100% of the people, twice per week. It seems so simple, I guess I must be missing something.
Will all students be required to have the app? How will it be policed if the student temporarily turns it off or leaves the phone at home (while they go out to party, for example)? I’ve read that the telephone contact tracers are having trouble in places like NYC and somewhere in CA, because people aren’t forthcoming with information. And in one place, the contact tracers were going to have to go to the people in person who wouldn’t answer their phones…ugh…
@CTTC The app is for contact tracing and reporting cases- not tracking kids movements.
ETA- and yes I agree about people not being forthcoming! I know people who have tested positive and not given names of people that they have been with!
I bet our kids go to the same school. Or maybe not – there’s probably lots of schools playing it down to the wire, telling people what they want to hear early on and then going radio silent about any specifics. I fully expect the rug to be yanked out from under us about 2 weeks before move in. I have fully cancellable hotel reservations for 3 separate weeks right now - band camp if everything moved back a week, band camp regular start date (which would be regular move in date moved back a week), and regular move in date - so I am covered for whatever the college ultimately decides. Glad we at least drive and don’t need to fly - plane tix aren’t so easy to cancel!
But yes, the complete oblivion of the parents in the forums is amusing and scary at the same time. Happily planning for parents weekend and for the delayed commencement - the plan announced this spring was to postpone May graduation to September (in other words, bringing thousands of people from all over the country back to campus for a weekend when classes are in session and students are already there) and people still think the college is going to hold it. Even my d’s marching band is happily planning a field show for the football games that everyone is so sure will happen despite this would involve 300+ kids assembling and blowing air and spit through wind instruments. No one seems to be thinking about the what-ifs at all.
Truly, I think Bowdoin is making the right call - I’d be surprised if any school is left with in person classes by the end of the semester …,maybe some small schools might succeed, but certainly not anything over 4000 students or so. Cynically I think this is a ploy for room and board money and we’ll all be kicked out by early October with those non-refundable clauses in our contracts.
Perhaps Bowdoin and other colleges that make similar decisions believe their high rankings will somehow protect them from a mass exodus. Perhaps they are right, or they may find out that this is an arrogant way of thinking and what they offer isn’t so unique after all.
There are many excellent colleges that will have students on campus this fall. They are finding ways to do this. Parents of Bowdoin students might balk at paying X dollars more for merely the Bowdoin name attached to a transcript. Or maybe that’s all they ever cared about.
The education at elite colleges isn’t superior to other colleges. What makes these small LAC unique is the community that they build. On-line learning doesn’t do this. Take away the small in person classes and the relationships (sorry, that isn’t and won’t happen with on-line, as any parent of a current student can tell you), they are quite ordinary.
Oh - ran across this article this morning. It’s an interesting take on what social distanced classes really look like when kids are spaced 6-8 feet apart - classrooms end up more like 13% capacity than 50%, which really limits class size.
And some professor ran a test of the hyflex stuff to see how well it really worked trying to teach to live students and online remote students at the same time with the brand new fancy equipment his college installed to the tune of $10K per classroom - it did not go well.
I still think most schools are looking at the hospitalization/death data for this specific age demographic and are making informed risk/benefit assessments.
I now know a number of students who have tested positive for the antibodies who felt fine enough to go to class while ill last winter. If this virus is as contagious as we think, I bet most of our returning college students were already exposed and will test positive for the antibodies.
Time will tell whether it’s the right or wrong call but I think it’s the most realistic. I’ve said from the beginning that nothing will change from the spring. No vaccine, no miracle drugs, and no herd immunity. The same reasons that kids were sent home will still exist in the fall.
It’s pretty clear that social distancing, washing hands, and possibly masks are helpful in stopping the spread but how realistic is that on a college campus is the question. I think Bowdoin has answered with what they think is realistic.
Either it was an overreaction to send them all home in the spring or it’s overconfidence (or something else) to bring them all back in the fall.
I posted earlier that I want to start hearing exit strategies for the fall in-case things go sideways.