Many US boarding schools have a meaningful percentage of international students. Given the US has a travel ban on China and several other countries, what are the schools doing about the spots they usually give to the international students that pay full tuition? Will the US government issue the visa a new student needs to enter the US to attend school? What happens if a student is accepted but cant attend due to the travel ban? Do their parents pay the full non-refundable tuition and hope for the best, or do the schools refund the tuition if they can’t get a visa and have a significant budget shortfall? Do the schools accept fewer international students this year? How does the situation affect the creation of the wait lists and the probability of getting moved from a wait list to an acceptance?
Good questions. I think any answers would be mere speculation. I would imagine the schools are trying to figure this out right now.
A lot is going to change between now and August/September. At some point, COVID-19 is going to be so widespread in the U.S. that the travel ban is likely to be replaced by better screening. My guess is that students will be allowed in but have to be quarantined until they show negative test results.
This is uncharted territory. There is no precedent for what the schools are dealing with. But the schools WANT the international students, so they are no doubt going to do their level best to make it work. It is just hard to say what they are even dealing with at this point.
The most recent epidemic in my memory that closely resembles this is from 2002-2004 with SARS. It was a similar situation. Most of the cases peaked in May, and then gradually tapered. By November there were almost no cases. (Source: Wikipedia).
But this virus has some characteristics that makes me think it will linger for much longer: greater incubation period, large % of asymptomatic carriers, lack of containment, etc.
This most certainly will impact students traveling from Asia who seek visas to enter the US. I honestly don’t think that most boarding schools have any idea on what to do. If I were them, I would be hesitant to offer a seat to someone who might not be able to get a visa.
My guess is that almost every BS is doing a lot of scenario planning around this right now.
For most, if the foreign students (or even just the Chinese) students couldn’t come (or come back) in September, it’d represent a meaningful number of empty beds in the dorm and seats in the classroom.
I wonder if some who are already enrolled will stay in the States for the summer, just in case.
I can say that Loomis is spending much of spring break preparing its faculty for a remote learning plan should we be unable to return after spring break. In this case, one major problem for boarding schools outside of the fact that students and faculty come from literally all parts of the world is that all the schools play each other essentially every Wednesday and Saturday so we are constantly at different bs campuses for athletics which makes the possibility of spreading disease from one campus to the other much higher. I do know from several friends that a large number of boarding schools (Choate, DA, PA, etc.) are also making plans for remote learning. We do not know, however, how long that would potentially last. My assumption is that international students will still be admitted and should they be unable to attend, remote learning would be set up for as long as necessary (as would be done for a current student stuck in an incubation period).
I think sporting events are the least of their problems. You have staff with spouses working elsewhere, kids in public schools, and day students going home to parents/siblings who go to work/school wherever. Plus boarding kids leaving campus all the time for all sorts of reasons which I suppose is one thing that could be curtailed relatively easily but perhaps not.
It will affect admission in a number of ways. One in particular relates to international students getting their I-20s.
I think yield will be affected and the waitlist will see more movement this year due to a variety of reasons — financial and logistical fallout, fear, and uncertainty.
I agree with @Calliemomofgirls, even for families in the US this will give anyone even a little bit on the fence second thoughts. And should the situation get worse and schools not re-open after spring break as planned the yield could absolutely tank for the lower tier schools in particular.
i’m really curious about how the BSs did during the Spanish Flu outbreak. Did they shut down?
By this September, the U.S. might be the hardest hit (knock on wood) country. We have no way of predicting the future but DOW seems to bet on it - as of now it is plunging by 7%. The good news is that anyone can be tested for infection. For the schools, it is not difficult to confirm who is infected and who isn’t - a 1-minute blood test would do. Most boarding schools can certainly implement this test to every arrival on campus. Most of them are rather secluded locationwise.
^^ Detection of infection is not as simple as it seems. This requires a RT-PCR (reverse transcriptase PCR). This basically amplifies any of the virus RNA present in the sample. But the issue is that there is a long incubation period. So samples collected early in the course of illness may not show anything (false negative). The amplification technique can also introduce false positives if done incorrectly.
PCR machines are widely available. But the ability to collect, store, ship and analyze samples properly is another matter.