My S is ASD and his experience has been that yes he got an education but not a college experience. He is graduating a year early and has stated that college is waste of time, except to get him a job. Being ASD he does not know how to make friends, and has been friendless. he was started to work on it Spring of his Freshman year. The problem this fall for him was the masks. For someone with ASD they dont understand social cues and rely on facial expressions to help them. Being online in Zoom is maskless, but last year he got very despressed being in his room all the time, except for the few masked classes he had in person. Could he have done social stuff , yes, if he was capable. I have another Neurotypical child whose last 1 1/2 semester were all online, but was able to maintain social stuff.
The best experience my S has had in the last two years was this summer where his coop was in person in an office with about 6 people.
So no, they dont all adjust. I am not sure if I should have kept him home last year and had him work somewhere such as the grocery store, but I have a feeling he would not have returned to get his degree then.
i hope this varient is âdoneâ by the end of January, and maybe for the last few months of his college career we move to endemic and maybe, just maybe, maskless. Just like the few months this past summer . he will be job searching, and I have a feeling will only be wanting to work somewhere that offers âin personâ . he will not survive a remote job .
It might have been easier if all these modifications served some purpose, but I am not at all convinced they did anything except drive up the mental illness rate. Students at Baylor or Auburn or wherever seemed to have a completely normal time, and 99.9% of those students who got covid seemed to recover very quickly. The rest will probably get omicron and recover quickly from that too. These schools did not lose scores of faculty or staff to covid; I am not sure the faculty/staff covid rate there exceeded that of the average Town resident exposed during the daily activities of life. However, the student psychiatric hospitalization rate quadrupled at my kidâs northeastern school.
Is this the thread where folks are posting what colleges are doing for the return semester? UCONN is delaying in person instruction and move in by two weeks.
My d had some friends over yesterday who were at school last semester (D was at her co-op). Sounds like it was a very normal semester with the exception that the university still de-densified classroom spaces so most of the exams were take home or given remotely. Classes were in person but still being recorded so if students had to isolate they wouldnât miss instruction. Profs werenât allowed to consider attendance as part of the grade.
Still waiting for an update for spring semester but so far the university is saying masks continued to be required, and vaccines/boosters recommended or mandatory weekly testing. Semester starts 1/10 so they are cutting it close if they end up doing a delay or moving to remote classes.
And those at colleges that have shut down more can leave and choose colleges that are more open. Many of the southern schools have been open and having âclasses as normalâ since fall 2020. Dorms open, dining halls open, in person classes. Those options are there, but they may not be at the schools you want to attend.
At the beginning of the pandemic, and at the beginning of this thread, parents were saying their kids would do anything to go back to school. Single rooms, wear masks, wash their hands 10 thousand times a day, test every day and quarantine for as long as the school required if positiveâŠanything. Students were okay with eating outside, closed gyms, no sports. They would do some activities remotely (clubs, study groups, research meetings) but just wanted to be at school. Now there are complaints that food is take out only because the students will just be eating with their same 8 friends anyway. Yes, but they wonât be eating with a different 200 people every day. I too think the school are being overly cautious, but Iâm not the entity that will be sued by the parents (or an employee) if there is an outbreak and they werenât taking every precaution. If you donât like the options at Penn or Yale or Stanford, there are other schools with different options.
Things will never go back to âas they were.â They werenât the same as when I went to college, when I went they werenât the same as when my father went to college. Current college kids have to make their experience enjoyable to them, but within the new standards.
My daughter goes to a college that doesnât have a lot of the rules discussed on this list. She wears a mask, but thatâs about it. Little testing, clubs and sports are open. Dorms, dining, library back to ânormalâ with the same dining options as in 2019, same hours, same restrictions of NOT taking food out of the dining hall. The school offers a few online classes but thatâs because many students choose that format either all the time or for a semester (big state, not everyone can live on campus). Those schools exist if thatâs the experience you want.
We have had a few conversations at home during the break so far. D20 had an abysmal first year - trapped in her room most of the time, no in person classes or activities, grab and go dining, socially isolated and told to only interact with floor-mates so contact tracing would be easier. Last semester was so much better (but not 100%) with in person classes and activities and she actually met people and made friends. Recent developments with omicron and our 20% positivity rate are weighing on her very heavily. She will not do online school again and I donât blame her. Her mental health (and GPA, tbh) canât deal with it anymore. She has resigned herself that her entire college experience will never be what she imagined it to be. She has already had to scrap ideas of study abroad and one big program for sophomores has been cancelled and the other most likely will be soon.
She is focusing on the quality of her education, the potential of the alumni network to help her find a job, and the lack of debt when she is done. It helps her pay less attention to the dining, social, and club aspects that are all big disappointments. It is heartbreaking to think her college experience is just about half over and she has not had any semblance of ânormalcyâ yet.
As we evaluate our S22âs options for next year, how the colleges he is considering have handled covid will definitely factor into where he decides to attend. These days it is one more factor in the decision making process. After the terrible experience he had last year as a HS junior, remote schooling is off the table. If that is all that is on offer, heâll take a gap year.
I think some of the issue too, with the messaging, is as you said - while some colleges are wound very tight, others are business as usual. Itâs hard to adjust to continued requests for sacrifices at one college, when other colleges are asking for none.
Choosing a college for the Class of 2025 (and likely for classes beyond) was a leap of faith peppered with a huge learning curve. Most students were (are) more than willing to comply with some inconveniences (masks, testing at some colleges, minor interruptions in in-person learning), but theyâve been promised a light at the end of the tunnel that hasnât come to some places - while others are having a 99% normal college experience. Itâs hard to make sense of why there are so many completely different reactions to Covid, depending on where you are.
My D has also been lucky to be someplace that has found a happy medium to the Covid situation. Not completely normal, but pretty close. She still laments about her bfâs college, where there are no restrictions whatsoever- but I remind her that she could also have chosen that college, which she knows would not have been the right fit for her regardless of the Covid freedoms.
We should have a separate thread for that. I keep watching what everyone else is doing. Temple University announced on Dec 22nd that the first two weeks were virtual (starts 1/10) but the dorms would be open, and then yesterday announced dorms closed for the first two weeks as well.
Have there been suits like this already? Wouldnât we already have seen them from school year 2020-21? Unfortunately some college students have died from covid over the last 20 months, including some at schools with little to no restrictions.
This describes my S19 and S21âs experiences at their colleges in totally different parts of the country.
I do think kids who started college in 2020 had it the worst, as they had to navigate a completely new world and try to make friends at a time when there were still a lot of restrictions in most parts of the country. At least the other classes had established friend groups by that point.
Kids starting this past semester in 2021, while also adjusting to life as a new college student in a pandemic, mostly did not have nearly the same restrictions as the previous freshman class. S21 goes to a school (not in the south) with a vaccine and mask mandate, but for the most part he had a fairly typical first semester (played a club sport, had a social life, participated in a couple of clubs that met in person, could use the gym, eat in the dining hall, all things the previous freshman class were mostly unable to do).
Pretty sure that the other threadâs intent is just to list what colleges are or are not doing, not to give opinions on whether they are doing the right or wrong thing like this thread is filled with.
One other issue that colleges may be considering: is Delta still lurking? If so, and even if a college decides that Omicron is more of an annoyance than a danger to a vaccinated population, it may still hesitate to remove restrictions because the apparently more dangerous Delta could still cause bad outcomes.
âIt might have been easier if all these modifications served some purpose, but I am not at all convinced they did anything except drive up the mental illness rate.â
Totally agree. They are window dressing for omicron, with an R0 of 8. Virtue signaling. And then an extra slap in the face knowing that zero schools will cancel sports and practice - clearly those are a higher priority than education.
Hopefully colleges that are being overly restrictive this semester will get punished heavily with transfers and less new students.
Unfortunately, most people in this country have limited options in practice when it comes to college. We still have state universities and ccâs for a reason: people need the in-state subsidy if theyâre to go at all, and at this point a whole lot of students arenât 18-19 years old, but are adults who have to keep the rest of their lives/families going while working on degrees.
Theyâre way ahead of you, suzy. So long as theyâre lockstep with peer institutions nothing will happen because you guys wonât take the social risk (or youâre effectively trapped and canât afford anything else). They know that and are busy protecting their workforce viability.