Let’s focus on the OP, please, and resist the urge to let users lead you down the garden path to off-topic-land.
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The thing is, though, that past responses to COVID seem to have relatively little to do with future ones. Not just in colleges, but public schools and government agencies. In many cases, places that erred on the side of caution early on faced major backlashes and are hesitant to do it again. Others realized after trying to be open but having to close due to staffing issues or mandates beyond their control, that this just compounded the unpredictability of pandemic life and are wanting to get ahead of things and go remote on their own terms instead of waiting for it to be forced by circumstance.
It’s the nearly unheard of situation of institutions learning from things they could have done better and making changes. But of course, not ALL colleges, so you can’t even base your decisions on the assumption that they’ll do something different than they did before!
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My kid’s school went virtual for January term and I was pretty upset. It seemed a hasty decision at the time. They had taken a pretty balanced approach to testing, masks, etc for fall semester. How have you liked their other decisions? At our school there’s a Reopening Lead, who communicates all Covid related stuff to the school community. Can you find the equivalent and call and talk with them? It’s always good to put a face to these decisions, to hear their reasoning, hints for the future too. Who do they consult with to make decisions?
At our school I think it was just a logistics decision. They would prefer that people catch it while at home in January, which will probably happen with most kids. Less need for constant tests, contact tracing, staffing issues. And there is a week long break before spring semester starts, so they’d have to retest everyone on their return, again.
But by fall, I’d be surprised if any school is still testing asymptomatic students regularly, even after arrival on campus.
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I wouldn’t consider what they’re doing now a sign that they would do the same in the fall - though they might next January if covid becomes an annual mutation of concern.
The timing of the scheduled return to campus is a perfect storm of:
- newish variant
- students that over the last 6 weeks have dispersed to visit their families and probably gather with a large group of extended family, returned to campus to mix germs, then taken those back out into the world to share with all their high school buddies who are at different colleges
- weather that isn’t conducive to doing anything outside or even having the window slightly open in much of the country
- a population that has basically given up and won’t tolerate the request to wear a mask
- a variant that the vaccines aren’t particularly effective against
- in some areas, hospitals that are at capacity and experiencing staffing issues due to vaccine mandates, and while severe cases are uncommon in this age group, if you have enough students, there will probably be a couple who need to at least make a brief hospital visit and if parents feel the university bungled getting them the care they needed, you know it’s going to be ugly!
At the same time, at this point in the year, students are moderately well established at college and probably have at least a class or two with professors they know and have classmates they have previously met in person. That’s a huge difference from throwing brand new students into a remote setting. Depriving students of their freshman orientation activities really IS going to have a lasting impact on their feelings of being connected to others at school - and that’s going to hurt the school financially because students that don’t feel a connection to their alma mater aren’t going to donate to the school after they graduate!
Basically, what I’m saying is that the cost/benefit analysis the schools have to do regarding going remote in January or September are completely different.
Looking around at the number of people I currently know who have covid or are quarantining, if schools returned in person on their regular schedule, there would probably be quite a few students missing the first week of classes, and trying to get caught up after that is a real challenge. If they do 2-3 weeks online before returning, then all but the truly ill students can get a solid foundation before potentially being excluded from classes. Our school is still holding with their in-person plans, but the more I think about it, I can really see the logic behind delaying.
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Texas Tech where my freshman daughter is not going virtual, or delaying
Is he starting next fall? If so - you are overreacting if that is the case.
Firstly, most colleges are doing similar due to the new variant.
Second - most HS were closed for the same amount of time.
It’s definitely not easy or ideal but this type of reaction can cause so much extra stress on your son.
I would take a step back - you have a long way to go. Hopefully everything is more normal when he starts.
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Yesterday you posted that Texas Tech “will allow each faculty member to decide if they want to teach online or hybrid or keep their class in person for the first 3 weeks with all classes going back to in person on February 4th.”
Has that changed?
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I do hope the OP feels better getting the feelings out, venting can help. Looking at it from the public health perspective can help too. As Creekland and other posters referenced, schools aren’t going remote primarily to protect young, healthy, vaccinated young adults, they are protecting their communities large and small. The risk to be concerned about is collective, not personal to one student at a time. And it goes beyond faculty, staff, etc. to the wider community. Currently, hospitals are overrun across the country, staff are MIA having quit, been sick, or running on fumes. The doctors I know and serve on committees for school Covid policy say it is vitally important to flatten the curve and fast. If your student gets an appendicitis and suffers or dies while waiting in an overrun ER after a 12 hour wait, that is the kind of risk they are addressing - capacity, resources, etc. It isn’t made up, it is happening and it isn’t just that our kids for the most part would be fine if they got it. We need to tamp it down and even if we all end up getting it at some point, we can’t all get it at once or risk imploding the entire health care system. In DC, the major colleges and universities are going remote and while I cringe inside for my kid next year, one large reason for going remote during this surge is the community spread, rate, and resulting stress on the entire health care system. As parents, we need to widen our lens and approach this looking at the collective community risk vs our child or our family getting Covid and being “fine.” But it sucks!
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agree
FWIW, I don’t think your overreacting or need therapy.
It IS your child’s college experience, but if YOU are writing the checks, I would be concerned also about spending the money on a remote experience (although there are some on CC who feel their child received the same college experience while being remote, regardless of the tuition price tag). That said, there’s only a limited amount of “crystal-balling” one can do and almost no guarantee that colleges who are committed to in-person learning, will stay that way.
I would recommend researching how the college has been handling Covid from the original shutdown until now to see what the pattern has been. Have they been mostly remote? For how long? Are they allowing students to interact with one another? Can they have roommates? Are events chronically canceled? Are they requiring that students undergo regular testing regardless of symptoms? What are they doing with students who test positive?
I think it’s a pretty fair bet that most colleges will try to stick to the pattern that they’ve been following, with some tweaks along the way. For example, barring a state or federal shutdown mandate, I doubt that The University of Tennessee, with a solid pattern of in-person classes, no vax requirement and no current mask mandate (recommended, but not mandated) would suddenly institute a grab-n-go, students sheltering in place in dorm rooms, mandatory surveillance testing, etc. type of policy. (Not picking on UTK, just using them as an example as they have been pretty steadfast in their Covid policy since Day 1).
Since your child is familiar with his HS being closed, make sure he understands the difference between living at home during remote learning, and living on campus with limited access to services (assuming the college allows on-campus living at all). Many of the 2020 students found it to be very isolating and depressing.
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OP: Thank you for posting your thoughts & concerns in such an open & honest manner. The primary issue that you present is real:
Mental health & emotional well-being versus extreme precautions against the spread of a disease.
And the secondary issue that you present is also a very real concern:
Is any school–even one’s dream school–worth the investment of substantial time & money for a remote experience ?
The mental health & emotional well-being of both students and their family members is at risk in situations requiring near isolation and other protective measures. Adding in hefty tuition payments for a greatly diminished learning & social experience, it is easy to understand your current state of mind after a preceding 15 months of remote learning.
The referenced medical article presents one viewpoint in a very effective fashion.
Clearly there is no easy course of action. But, like much of life, resiliency & adaptability are necessary qualities that all must utilize in order to get through this pandemic.
Activities such as long-distance running, weightlifting, swimming, reading, watching movies, playing games online, chat rooms, writing, and socializing at a distance are some ways to deal with the mental stress many are now experiencing due to isolation. Enjoying the company of pets,gardening, cross-country skiing, photography, prayer, painting/drawing, learning a new language, learning a new skill, etc. are some other ways to engage one’s mind in a healthy manner during periods of isolation.
There are no easy answers, yet the risk of driving individuals to an emotional & mental breaking point is very real.
The best course of action at this time may be to search for permissible & safe activities which lessen the impact of isolation.
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My daughter is heading down to Clemson tomorrow, they are not delaying. Since they don’t have a vaccine mandate, they all get tested weekly. My daughter had Covid last year, 2 shots and a booster, and I totally expect her to test positive at some point, and have to quarantine. Hopefully they will have space, because we are 12 hours away. Her sister’s university has a vaccine mandate, so no regular testing, I feel like she has a much less likely chance of having to quarantine. Both will get tested on campus before classes start.
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Pretty sure I know what uni you are talking about - we have one there. IF I am right you are simply wrong to say that they “blatantly” disregard the students health & well being. Because of their vax & testing policies they were at the very top end of universities keeping in-person classes going throughout the last year and a half. For almost the whole time they kept numbers well under control.
However: despite the super-high vaxxed student & staff population and a very well run testing system, when omicron hit in the run up to Christmas their infection rate sky rocketed. All of their covid-positive student housing was full, staff were going down like skittles and they ended up having to send people home in the middle of finals. That was traumatic for the students- but also for the faculty and staff. They have delayed the January return to give time to phase things back in and avoid a massive infection rate. Overall, they have done an exemplary job of navigating changing and uncertain waters. This delay in coming back should be filling you with confidence in how responsible they are in managing a very difficult situation.
tl;dr: this school is not your son’s HS, college is not HS, your son is not who he was 2 years ago, but most of all what you are seeing as a red flag is actually a sign of a school that is at the leading edge in terms of minimizing the negative effects on the university community- students / staff / faculty- of living through a pandemic.
ps,
Blaming school administrators is neither accurate nor helpful. They did not damage his mental health. The decisions they made as to how to manage an unprecedented pandemic may well have had a negative impact on his mental health. Is it possible that if they had made different decisions, or if the administrators had had better/different skills or resources they might have been able to make better decisions? Of course. But the reality is that those 15 months were problematic for almost everybody, across the country.
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This sounds like the University of Rochester. My son is a current student at UR and the Eastman School of Music. The way the move to virtual instruction was communicated was terrible. However, the motivation for the move to online instruction is reasonable. The powers that be do not think that students are at much risk, however, there is a real worry about the sheer number of infections and the ability to offer services to both students and the community. Moreover, the hospital system is so overrun at the moment that dealing with non Covid-19 emergencies will be genuinely difficult. This really is a temporary issue since Omicron looks to come into a community and leave pretty quickly. Also, most other universities are doing something similar, for the same reasons.
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I’m another who believes you are not overreacting - especially in light of the money you’re going to be paying for an experience that is lesser than what was advertised. My GD in the same position took a gap year, used the year productively, and is glad she did. She filed for the gap year in the week before school opened in the fall, so you have time to see what develops and assess conditions in the summer.
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You do realize that by next September, the Covid virus will have very likely devolved into another common cold virus, and hence, going remote is extremely unlikely to be an issue for your child. But if you don’t like this (and I can certainly understand why - I’d be livid if my kid’s school went remote now), go ahead and break the ED agreement. Send them a letter detailing your concerns and reasons, and say Sayonara to that school, because he sure as hell will not be able to reverse that choice and go there.
I do think that if you do this, it’s ultimately cutting off your nose to spite your face, and that it will hurt your son, because there clearly were reasons that he wanted to go to this school. If things look dicey this summer, have him take a gap year and do something amazing that’s NOT focused on trying to impress a college, but is a real gap year doing something for himself. By the fall of 2023, this really will be over, I promise you. This is the 1918-19 flu pandemic, not the Black Death or smallpox.
As for their decision to go remote, please try to remember that the people in their late teens and early 20’s are not the only people there - faculty and staff are older; in fact, some are in their '70’s, and some have conditions that make them more vulnerable, or preclude immunization. And some of them don’t want to fight with students who refuse to comply with masking.
My older kid just got notification that the first meeting of their first class will be on zoom - and I cannot blame the prof one bit. Hopefully, after this wave has passed, which I suspect will be by early February, that prof will feel safe holding in-person classes.
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California high schools were outliers in their covid response compared to the rest of the world. I certainly understand her concern that she not choose to replicate that experience for college. This summer will hopefully clarify matters more.
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Thank you for taking the time to respond. I think part of my panic is that my son is not a student yet, and I really don’t know much about their other decisions, except that students have been required to be vaccinated and now boosted (which makes sense to me). The decision to close for January is not in the best interest of students, so my fear is that there are more anti-student decisions to come. My son’s high school made decision after decision that put the students’ interests at the bottom of the priority list, and I am just very sensitive to that happening again. I do know the college has been fully open this fall (some big CA are still doing a lot of classes online), but I am not sure what happened last year. This is one of my first real encounters with their administrative decisions and especially because they announced closure literally hours before students were to arrive on campus, I was really upset. They have a world class medical center so they probably got good advice (I work at a world class medical center too, and trust the advice of the infectious disease specialists there much more than I do the CDC).
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I’ve posted here before that I live in Chapel Hill NC, home of UNC-Chapel Hill which will not be remote for the spring term, but will leave it up to the Deans of the various schools. A lot of community members here in Chapel Hill are not happy with that decision and wish they would go remote like Duke, down the road, is doing, but UNC’s hands are tied by the Board of Governors, which is appointed by the Republican legislature (been a whole political thing in recent years).
So if it’s Duke he is going to, know that many in the community think this is a great decision. I am friends with professors at UNC and Duke both. Duke just has the autonomy that UNC does not. Both have great med schools and are great about taking the kids’ physical and mental health into account.
And I get you with the mental health aspect. My daughter is HS class of 2022 also and has hated being remote, but she is certainly not the only one! She has met up with some of her friends and done Zoom school outside in nice weather (6 feet apart with masks on). It has been tough and she hasn’t learned as well, but she is still close with her friends and they have gotten through it together.
I think you are overthinking. Who knows what it will be like 9 months from now. You just gotta play the hand you are dealt and make the best choices you can. If you opted for Early Decision, you must have researched the school and felt like it was the right place for him. Have faith that they are doing the best that they know how.
Although, as a UNC alum, if it’s Duke I gotta say “Go Heels! Beat Dook!”
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Yes, I do feel better venting, especially so my family (my son in particular) didn’t have to hear it. I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to respond and remind me of the sensible positions I probably normally would adopt if I weren’t so triggered by the fear of remote learning. My daughter graduated from high school in 2020 and is now a freshman in college. She ended up with a gap year because her university decided 2 weeks before freshman year was to start that they would bar all kids from campus. I will never forget reading that email. Now her university has developed really sound COVID protocols and strategies - including building their own testing lab facilities - and is NOT going remote even though the area is swamped with COVID.
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