My kids say exactly the same thing; one is at a school that will test all students once per month, the other at a school that won’t do any surveillance testing after arrival testing.
This is standard practice—if vaccinated and possibly exposed just watch for symptoms, especially given the PPE /masks /infection control of most clinic settings
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actually that’s not what I heard. Masks expected for all until second negative test and then vaccinated students do not have to wear them but professors have the right to ask kids to wear them in their classrooms. So vaccinated kids might have some classes in masks or none at all. Up to the prof.
It was a little confusing since they county just changed tiers but I think it’s a recommendation after the initial testing period except on the bus, teacher space on request, etc.
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I see. Recommended versus required. I guess the kids will figure that out!
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Oy vey. What this says to me is that we’re just going to have massive incoherence and confusion as people notice the holes in this, notice that delta means something different…I don’t even want to think about what new variant emergence is going to mean.
I think this is going to be a very difficult fall, winter, early spring. I’m also not excited about the political ramifications of what leaderlessness will mean.
I think this will reasonably vary by school, by student and by program of study. Also the philosophy of the institution. My kids’ college tried to hold as normal a year as was physically possible last year while still respecting the decisions of faculty members on their preferred modality of instruction. The prevailing approach was “let’s learn to work around Covid so that we can get back to doing what we love doing” - which at that school is teaching, learning and research. That worked very well for us - I think my kids would have been very bummed had they been forced on a P/NP grading system in the spring of 2020 or had been shut out of their campus during the 20-21 academic year. I think that the admin had to work pretty hard to accommodate those things everyone loved doing but still keep Covid at bay so that nothing ended up shut down. They seemed to approach it as a problem to solve rather than a horrible event that just changes everything now and Making. Everything. So. Hard. Full disclosure: this is an elite private. Things might be very different in the non-honors track of a large public.
One measure I took on how the pandemic impacted everyone was to see how many of our Odyssey (low income) scholars graduated in ‘21. While detailed tracking wasn’t possible, it did appear that the overall number who graduated was pretty much as expected. I can’t begin to compare my kids’ journey to these incredible scholars (many of whom are the first in their family to go to college) but I was very happy that the pandemic didn’t take an obvious hit on their progress to graduation.
I know a few profs at our local flagship who felt that some of their PhD students were struggling, but it might come down to specific subject. Clearly, anyone depending on travel or a physical location (such as a lab) for their research would have suffered some productivity loss, at least between March and Sept. But others with simpler requirements seemed to do just fine. Weaker students probably weren’t helped by the potential for less collaboration, and everyone likely needed to be more proactive about getting their work done and scheduling time for collaboration. If something was lost, it won’t show up for several more years when some of these students are trying to put a thesis together.
Whether one is a grad student or undergrad, I do fear that if they readjust their expectations in the wrong direction they will be horribly left behind. There are plenty of opportunists out there who currently have a polished resume or research abstract - who took advantage of the panic and the shut downs to hunker down and really get some work done. Those who feel that productivity has been or should be reduced will be compared to these other guys for things like post-grad employment or graduate school admission. I doubt any allowances will be made. The dean of College Admissions at my kids’ school was pretty clear this time last year to those who were applying for Class of '25 slots: show us how you are overcoming some of these pandemic obstacles, how creative you were in learning about our school even if you can’t visit in person or speak to an admissions rep face to face. Those who write about how everything is falling to pieces probably won’t be maximizing their chances for admission.
While I sympathize with those who are truly frightened about Covid, I’m not sure that an analogy to civilian Britain during wartime makes much sense to me. There’s a huge difference, IMO, between social distancing and masking and having to shut out my lights for fear of having a bomb dropped on my house. I think that the latter would indeed wear me down from daily fear. But the former to me has mostly been an inconvenience. YMMV of course; personal experience isn’t a blue print for everyone.
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I think this is the nugget of it here.
I remember hearing similar things about making allowances for having children, being ill, etc. I don’t hear them so much anymore, because those allowances (after decades of fighting) have been institutionalized, but in general I’d say the fears aren’t realized, and that the step-backs because of real problems tend to come out in the wash. Nobody’s the wiser, mostly because nobody cares that much: nobody’s inspecting your career that closely. (I’ve just checked up on one person I knew who came roaring out of [elite school] and then got hit with a double whammy – unexpected, largely unsupported single parenthood plus naivete about what that would mean, then bad cancer – and she seems to be back up on top after disappearing for a while.) The exception might be at the very top, but so many things can go wrong there, including whims of fashion and political misfortune, that an expectation of staying at the top is…well, it’s not an uncommon pathology, but a pathology nonetheless. If you’re lucky, you get your time.
If what you’re looking at is productivity metrics, I think this is the wrong thing to be looking at. Yes, people will force themselves through and manage. Mostly. And a few will have a reasonably good time of it. But the cost of forcing through is often immense, and I don’t think it’s necessary when you can look ahead to dusting off, recovering, picking up again.
I also don’t think it’s necessary to look at “pull back” in a binary way, where it’s full steam or P/NP. From a professorial standpoint, you can look at what you might expect to cover over the course of a semester. Scale back. Yes, I know, there are course progressions. These too are fungible, made by humans, adjustable by humans.
If your preoccupation is a deep fear that someone will look at your four undergraduate years and say, “Well, that wasn’t a real four undergraduate years at [place]”, then I would suggest that this is coming from an equally deep, narrow, and unnecessary snobbery that fails to notice that people can learn outside of that particular well-branded crucible. It’s the kind of thing that you hear from people who’re also given to expressing genuine surprise that someone who hasn’t got [elite qualification] does something exceptionally well. It’s often followed by surprise that this person hasn’t got the elite qualification and a lot of bother about redressing that situation, as though the thing that’s really important is the qualification and its prestige rather than the fact that the person does the thing well.
For people not consumed by that sort of thing, avoiding unnecessary trauma and exhaustion are probably more important.
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You missed the word some. Some people lose their minds due to trauma, whether that trauma is a war, a pandemic, or something much more trivial. Some people seem to have “lost their minds” over politics in the last few years.
But most people get on with life, whatever it holds. Most people my age have parents born during WW2. Our grandparents certainly got on with life, regardless of the bombs.
Incidentally this was a good read about the Blitz, which was largely concentrated in a three month period. There wasn’t continuous danger on the home front for five years: https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Vile-Churchill-Family-Defiance/dp/0385348711/
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Unfortunately, many majors that rely on sequential coursework or a particular body of knowledge in order to meet expectations for grad school or a professional designation might make it difficult to pull back. For instance, has the MCAT or med school admissions criteria been scaled back? If not, then those pre-meds aren’t going to see their courses adjusted much. Not even sure that med schools should be “fungible,” unless we as a society are willing to sacrifice on the qualify of healthcare down the road. Scaling back today might mean a worse health outcome for us all tomorrow.
However, totally agree that some might prudently re-evaluate their professional or academic plans, given obstacles arising from the pandemic. There can be tremendous good in doing so - even an inadvertent means of putting on on a better path. We can’t control all that happens around us but we can manage how we respond to it.
I can tell you that outside of spring 2020 I know of no professor who wished to scale back any course work, but my sample isn’t representative by any means. From what I’ve observed, administrations try to provide the infrastructure of support for students so that everyone does their best, but that doesn’t mean all will do equally well, and there is no way to change that fact. If one scales back the course, one hands an easier A to the best students, who can then fill their spare time with other things to keep that resume polished, now that they don’t have to spend as much time on their coursework. Or they will enroll in a higher course load and graduate earlier. In other words, their motivation to take advantage of every opportunity open to them won’t change in the least. Some may continue to stress themselves out doing so - but again, not clear that would be from the pandemic. What drives a person is usually an internal thing, not external.
Totally agree that luck can propel one’s career, especially at the top. In academic, being lucky to have the right advisor, good health, not too complicated a family situation etc. will clearly help greatly. Family and medical leave are indeed institutionalized in grad programs now (from what I can see). Expected time to PhD has crept up in at least some areas for a number of reasons, including increased demand for published work. Still, it’s a set number of years to completion that is expected, and those who go beyond risk a bunch of things, including their funding and their academic job prospects (NB: time to PhD really matters on the academic market; industry/gov’t/non-profit might be a different story). Medical leave, family leave and pandemics will only buy one so much more additional time. Most who put off going on the academic market last year did so not because they needed additional time or were hit hard with some aspect of the pandemic, but because no one was hiring faculty. What did they do with their extra year? Try for a post-doc. Work on putting out another paper. Improve their current work so it’s more polished. Any and all of the above. And why? Because despite pandemics and other crises, institutions still want to hire those who are the most productive. Perhaps time to PhD isn’t the best metric, but it’s clear to me that some metric of productivity is needed. The risk of ending up with deadwood is a pretty sizable one, and departments don’t want their own funding cut due to their poor hiring decisions 
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I’m glad that a lot of schools are requiring masks and doing testing for the fall and hope more continue to do so. Hopefully by taking precautions they can avoid moving back to online classes.
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I think this has been the reality in many places. Many aren’t going to get tested unless absolutely sick as they don’t want to deal with the consequences of a positive test. I can certainly see that happening this coming year at a lot of schools. Especially if someone is vaccinated and has much less risk of adverse effects.
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Daughter will be a freshman at Skidmore College in NY. They announced masks for all indoors, negative Covid test required before getting to campus if participating in an off campus pre-orientation program, which daughter is signed up for. Then when she gets back to campus another Covid test, followed by a third Covid test a few days later. They will then determine testing from there… (Vaccination mandatory.) Anxious mom here.
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In my opinion it’s very disrespectful to speculate what someone else may say or may be thinking. I don’t see how that is in any way appropriate. Now if a person actually writes something then a response would be different.
Why would COVID change these students’ and their parents’ preferences? The colleges that are likely to be the least affected are those fully residential and relatively small with little or controllable interactions with surrounding communities, and with resources to test and isolate when necessary. At these colleges, why would off-campus housing be more desirable?
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What concerns me about proposed universal testing of everyone (vax and nonvax) on campus, and consequent quarantine/isolation rules, is that it will make in-person instruction really unwieldy and impractical. No one (students or faculty) wants to miss two weeks of class because of a positive test. In normal times if a student missed two weeks, I would say that’s about the maximum amount of time possible before one should just withdraw from a class. If we’re all going to get Covid at some point, even if asymptomatic, and if we all have to isolate, then how can we have meetings with half the class out for two weeks, and the instructor too? That’s a mess.
What is the end goal of campus Covid policy? To keep case numbers down, or to prevent people from getting really sick? If the virus is now endemic in the population (as some are suggesting), then I would rather just mandate vaccination (no exceptions), drop the constant testing and quarantine of even vaccinated asymptomatic people, and get on with it, like we do with measles/mumps/rubella. Maybe this semester is too soon to do this, until we learn more about breakthrough infections, but I am really hoping that we are not facing years of this.
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Everything is fluid right now. I’m sure changes will be made as students start moving back to campus. I just can’t shake the constant worry for my D20 especially with the delta variant. I’ll probably know more details in the next few days as she moves back to campus after lunch today.
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Well, I agree with all of that but I have a feeling we won’t get to that place until at least spring semester when the children of faculty can get vaccinated so they are protected from their parents bringing home Covid from campus via a breakthrough infection.
Last night, on Colgate’s call, they said more than once that professors are ready to make sure anyone who is isolated will be kept up to speed in class. They are looking at it like pre-pandemic illnesses if a student got sick and was out for a week. At a small school, I think that might be ok…unless there end up being way more cases than expected. That does seem to be the plan at most schools because they aren’t offering any remote instruction. I guess they are betting on cases being low enough that it won’t be a problem.
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And months before CDC recognizes they should have been tracking all breakthrough cases and not just the ones resulting in hospitalization or death. And months before the CDC acknowledges that breakthrough cases (even if asymptomatic or mild) can result in long covid.
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