Got any evidence for this? Any uptick in suicide among 18-22 year olds in the last six weeks?
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The mental issues from the pressures at school may be somewhat alleviated by being home and out of the hyper competitive environment. I know anecdotally that school kids around me with conduct disorders are much calmer riding their bikes and climbing on their swingsets than being in school.
I just watched a clip from a school in Canada that opened up. Half the kids returned, the other half did not due to parental fear.
I think we all need to adapt to this new normal, and model that behavior for our kids so that they, too, can learn to adapt. No it’s not perfect, or anywhere near perfect. It’s fine to complain privately, but no good will come from complaining in front of our kids (not accusing)… it will only make it that much more difficult for them to adapt to this new normal. Do you want your kid texting all day with complaints, or do you want your kid to learn resiliency? And, if kids learn to cope …and to learn how to accomplish their goals within the framework of this new normal…won’t it be “easier” to spend this kind of money (And please remember that for many families, $20,000 is a ton of money. Not everybody is wealthy or upper middle class)?
I recognize that these changes are like ripping off a band-aid. I also recognize that nobody wants to spend money for their kid to have a significantly reduced campus experience. They need to learn how to make it work, and from that experience comes maturity, leadership, versatility, and all of those attributes that we admire.
We need to adapt to whatever comes our way. Our kids need to learn how to handle whatever comes their way. It will only make them stronger adults.
@jagrren Not all of the elite schools have a “hyper competitive environment.” Amherst definitely doesn’t; ours is very chill. I stand by what I said earlier about continued social isolation for the Fall 2020 semester causing a significant spike in the suicide of college-age students, and I still think the effects on mental health would be much worse from isolation than returning to a hyper competitive environment; trust me, I know many people at Amherst whose mental health struggles have increased tenfold since they have been forced to leave school.
I can’t agree more that we don’t have enough information about what this virus does long-term to the human body. But I think the issue for colleges and kids going back is money. Colleges are saying that it is an existential crisis for them to not go back, and to not collect the same revenue stream as before. Some parents/students are saying that the product isn’t the same, so why should they pay the same if they go back. This then gets us into the lengthy discussion of what is the product/service that schools are selling and parents/students buying. And then goes back to the discussion of who should bear all or part of the financial burden if the product/service has been changed (as I think is being forced to change).
Perhaps we will also develop a more realistic view of life and death. Some posters seem to think everyone can and should live forever and every resource in the country should be used to delay that as long as possible. We all do have to die, eventually, and there actually are worse things than a pain free death after a full life of 80+ years. At least we can have a discussion about how other countries manage end of life care.
I think American colleges and universities that can swing it will open with a hybrid system. Kids will be welcomed back to campus and offered a smorgasbord of small classes or classes where social distancing can be introduced along with online classes taking the place of lecture courses or courses taught by professors who’d rather not take the risk of teaching live classes.
And, let’s be clear: It won’t be a matter of if, but when infections will occur. Hopefully, with contact tracing they can be prevented from developing into full blown outbreaks. As a corollary, schools will need to devote significant portions of their housing stock to serving as isolation wards. And, they should be close to a hospital.
People do have choices about things, as individuals and as groups. We’re not slaves. They might be making difficult choices from bad options, but they are not without choice.
Another informative article for readers of this thread (change the “dot” to an actual .)
https://www(dot)erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them?fbclid=IwAR18Jc9JrRoLGpeAGGVNNj7rFX7e6sVYZI0X4XqBQOasTPFDVOexiZhmQWI
“Dr. Bromage joined the Faculty of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2007 where he teaches courses in Immunology and Infectious disease, including a course this semester on the Ecology of Infectious Disease which focused on the emerging SARS-CoV2 outbreak in China.”
From the article we can see the likelihood of transmission under different conditions, and think about how this will play out in a college setting.
In my company, if people refused to go back to work for any reason other than medical condition, they will get fired. Fear of getting sick doesn’t count. I hope universities do the same.
High school juniors should explore overseas options. Sweden has a per capita corona death rate of less than one-third of NYS death rate, and the college experience there will not be impacted. Several universities offer classes in English. British universities (Yes, including residential) do not expect to stay online.
This is a must-read for everyone. Thank you for posting.
I read that article this weekend, and my takeaways were all our social settings should be outside as much as possible this summer – it’s prolonged sharing air with folks in close proximity where transmission is most likely to take place. Yes, to cleaning surfaces, but that doesn’t seem to be the big way COVID is spread.
We need to pay attention to air flow within buildings. Opening windows and using fans to draw air out?
Ok. Two things-
This is where we stand today. We don’t know the exact details of Bowdoin’s plan and the real decision making will start then. I think I’ve already written here somewhere that we’ve been told that all options are “less than ideal”. Kind of hard to collect full tuition with that caveat.
@homerdog - Maybe, I missed it but did you explain what DS would be doing during his gap year?
“So all you can do is ask what you’re willing to gamble someone’s life on — the life of someone you love — till we do know better. My guess is “sun-dappled campus and late-night study breaks” is not quite that important to you, in the end. Important, but not that important.”
I think this is a very unrealistic view of what young people (and in fact many others) are prepared to risk their lives to do, when that risk is perceived as real but low (significantly less than 1%).
I was quite prepared to take similar risks of death or permanent injury in college when climbing, caving and mountaineering for what was ultimately nothing more than the experience and because “it was there”. I know people who died and others who were seriously injured.
I worry when my D goes climbing, but I don’t stop her. Living her life on campus is no different, and I am fine with both my kids going back to their college towns and subleasing apartments this summer to get away from home and spend time with their friends. I trust them to be responsible just like I trusted them in high school and college not to do other stupid things.
However, colleges have plenty of higher risk-of-transmission situations (note: higher risk of transmission does not include risk of death or other bad outcome, which is heavily dependent on the infected person, and college students are mostly lower risk of death if infected than the general adult population):
If a residential college goes back to normal, it is likely that if a few students bring the virus in from the community, it will race through the college. That students are mostly in lower risk groups will mitigate the death and damage for them (but perhaps increase the chance that they become asymptomatic or low-symptom spreaders), but it could get riskier for faculty and staff (and others in the local community who have contact with students).
The college could do some mitigation, like having the dining halls be take-out only and setting up tents outside for classes (not necessarily doable in severe weather or where there is not enough outside space), but there would still remain the dorms and other group living situations that make it easy to spread the virus.
@circuitrider No real plan yet. Some thoughts include taking some classes online that would boost his resume for a lot less money. Harvard has a pre-MBA program that costs something like $3000 and has classes not offered at Bowdoin. He would maybe train for a marathon. He would make a concerted effort to make connections through LinkedIn with both Bowdoin alums and connections we have and do informational interviews since he’s undecided on what kind of job he wants to pursue. He could write. He loves to write (even though he will likely be a math or physics major, he will maybe minor in English). He could go back to art. He’s had very little time to paint since being at school. He’d love to go back to his old teacher if she’s having classes but he could also just spend time on it on his own. And, lastly, I’m sure he’d have some sort of a part time job.
If travel opens up even more, we could go on a family vacation since we won’t get to go anywhere this summer.
Honestly, I think that would be plenty for one semester. It’s just four months. He’s unlikely to take a year off but I know he could come up with more if it’s looking like he’d take another year off.
If his friends all take fall off, they could all move to Maine for the fall anyway and be together and do their own thing (online classes, work, network, etc). That sounds even better to me (and to him).
The article was saying “in ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000.”
No, it is not feasible to think that. For starters, there is no room on MIT campus to increase enrollment 10-fold. I could go on and list a myriad other reasons, but this one is already enough.
@ucbalumnus – actually, after reading this study I don’t think dorms are as much the issue as perhaps we thought. Most students are in rooms with 1 or 2 other people and so they are not constantly sharing air space with everyone in the dorm. You could schedule/stagger when students shower in common bathrooms to reduce shared air space. Suites are bigger but often students also have single bedroom in a suite even if they share a common room, so that helps some.
I think the transmission studies have more significant implications for classrooms and dining halls because both of them entail prolonged periods of time with shared air space with a larger group of people – usually at least 20 if not many more. That’s where I think mask wearing and social distancing needs to focus.
I think physics/engineering expertise needs to look at how to ventilate these spaces in ways that take air out of rooms as quickly as possible and in ways that reduce cross-contamination. Not easy, granted.
Montreal is having a really bad outbreak so that in part is what is informing McGill’s decision. I think also in general the Canadian government response has been much more conservative than that in the U.S. and Canadians for the most part have been willing to comply. Schools are more likely to err on the side of caution and I think the public funding model we have here in Canada may cushion the financial blow to most universities for the next fiscal year so they won’t be as incentivized to take a riskier path. DS19’s school has already said they are fine financially for this coming year even if they don’t get the same level of additional revenues from international students and with the downturn in the markets. If this continues into the next school year however that could certainly change.
I’ve been seeing more tentative reports from Canadian universities and I expect to see more of them going the same way. Most have not made any formal announcements but one large Ontario university has stated that their intention is to go to a hybrid model with large courses online and small courses in person rather than everything online. The Atlantic universities, which are in provinces that have been much less hard hit, seem to be signalling perhaps a return to in-person instruction, but they have a number of very small LAC-like schools where it would be more feasible.