From the Duke story:
"Price added that the next academic year will “not look anything like the past.”
I think that’s a weird thing to say. Kids want their college to look as close as possible to what they experienced last year and what they are paying for.
^But that’s an honest thing to say.
I think Duke’s statement is honest. The academic year will look different…there is no way to spin this to make it more attractive to students. I also think that it does us no good to protect our kids…they need to adapt to whatever is thrown at them. It will make them stronger.
Duke and UNC work very closely together. My D was permitted to take classes at Duke. It is no surprise that when UNC says school will look very different…Duke will say the same.
Yes …kids want their school to feel the same as last year. Yes…parents want to pay for the same experience as last year. That will not happen for awhile.
You can’t always get what you want…
a song rattling around in my head a lot lately
Ha! Ok. I’m clearly still having a little denial.
I asked S19 if he’d be ready to go back to a single, classes in masks, and take out food by early August if Bowdoin decided to go back earlier. He looked at me like I was nuts and said he’s ready to go back now. Said he and his friends will figure it out. He thinks second semester will be way worse than first semester. The weather will be way worse and the kids might be tired of all of the rules but, for fall, he’s ready to go. I think part of it is that he sees many of his XC classmates who got houses and stayed in Maine and they are out running near the beautiful ocean, getting together in small groups for outings and picnics. He’s stuck here with us. He did buy a road bike and has been riding here with friends who don’t run and he now has two jobs to rake in some cash but Maine is calling.
@homerdog my S is like yours. He’s ready to go back now.
He’s working and wearing a mask He doesn’t like the mask but he deals with it. He has begun hanging out with friends again. He’s gone hiking, and played basketball, and thrown footballs and sat around a fire pit with five friends sharing an order of takeout food. This is in a state that is supposedly shut down. If people think kids are not going to congregate when they get back to school, they’re nuts.
Forgot to add that his school is selling football tickets. He’s gotten email to buy them now saying they are refundable if football doesn’t happen or fans aren’t allowed. He’s going to buy them. I asked him whether he is concerned about going to a football stadium with lots of people, and he shrugged and said he’s not worried.
Seems to me…
Best case scenario: students are able to complete coursework and degrees with a whole lot of new, and not so fun,accommodations by them and their families
Worst case scenario: bad outbreak among faculty and staff shut down university entirely (not even online courses available) for a period of time. I guess some schools don’t recover in this scenario
And that’s not even counting deaths in the second scenario…
Your sons going back. Get used to it ?. I asked my senior to be son also that question and also looked at me like I was insane. He’s like “if campus is open I am there”. Whatever will be will be his new normal. Something to talk about in years to come.
Good questions and you are correct that not all answers are known at this time, but some are known. Yesterday the CDC indicated that 35% of positive cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic and 40% of transmission happens prior to onset of symptoms.
Asymptomatic individuals in a college setting can still spread the virus to other students, faculty and staff. Are they less infectious? I don’t know. If an individual, like Ms. Miller, is found to be positive through testing that individual needs to isolate for 10-days after the test. Those are the current guidelines.
Contacts are asked to quarantine for 14 days, but not everyone is considered to be a “contact” just because they happen to cross paths with an individual who becomes ill or tests positive. Contacts include people you live with, individuals you’ve had close contact with for more than 15 minutes or proximate contact for extended periods of time.
I’d assume that colleges and universities are working on plans which include the ability to quickly move back and forth between in-person and online instruction to support necessary quarantine/isolation periods.
Wesleyan has been projecting a lot of confidence, but it’s hard to believe that underneath it isn’t like planning for the D-Day invasion (apologies in advance for the WWII comparison.)
It’s started already at D’s school - we were just sent an email yesterday that 5 students have tested positive after multiple off-campus gatherings last week (students were theoretically sent home in March but some stayed and many others returned for move-out or to celebrate graduation last week.) The university and county health officials are asking anyone who was at any sort of “off campus gathering” on or after May 8 to monitor themselves and report any symptoms immediately. And that’s just the official line – the grapevine says many more students are showing symptoms or testing positive – and of course, many of these students have since moved back to their hometowns (apartment leases go by semester and ended when the semester did, thus the returning to town to move out), possibly taking the virus with them.
Relatively few students were on campus for move-out compared to what there will be in the fall. The university parents facebook page was full of reports of huge outside parties last week. Police tried to break up the gatherings they saw but really don’t have any way to effectively enforce it - the students just claim they are family or that they all live together. There is absolutely no way something similar isn’t going to happen in the fall on an exponentially larger scale. College students are simply not going to socially distance in the way that is needed to control this virus and colleges have very little control over students who live off-campus. And if students continue to party, it really won’t matter what colleges do as far as online classes or keeping class sizes low. I fear any attempt to reopen campus is rapidly going to turn into a hot mess.
I think it’s hard to picture what school will/can be like in the fall, but there are so many rapid changes occurring in states right now already, that some of our ongoing assumptions may be way off base. For example, in my state, we went from restaurants having curbside/takeout only, to outdoor dining (with greater spacing, etc) opening last week. On June 1st, indoor dining at up to 50% capacity will be available. I mean, I don’t plan to eat indoors yet, but that will be permissible. So if that’s the case, I highly doubt that colleges will only have takeout food to eat in your dorm room. If restaurants can have 50% capacity, I would think dining halls can have 50% capacity (with social distancing for lines, etc, and tables spaced further apart, etc). Of course things will be different on campus, but by September, the necessary accommodations may not be so draconian as they would be if they opened today.
(Of course there is the possibility of things getting worse again; impossible to predict).
The proportion of people already having had the disease is not 10% right now in most places. The average is more like 4%.
And let’s remember, if we double the number of people who get the disease, we double the deaths. If we go from 10% having had the disease right now to 40% having had the disease on September 1, we go from 100,000 dead now to 400,000 dead. I do not like this plan.
That would be true only if the people catching it later are the same types of people who already died. If we do a better job protecting the elderly and avoid hospital disasters, and the group of people catching it later are statistically much younger than before ( students and children), the outcome would vary.
Honestly we all need to get our kids wearing masks, doing social distancing now so when the fall comes around it’s more normal for them to do. We told both of our kids that are home now. On a nice day have friends come over, we /you can cook on the grill and just social distance in the backyard (of course make sure they /family members aren’t sick)
There is a whole lot of magical thinking in this country, from the White House down. Universities are among many institutions failing to face “the biological and moral reality of this once-in-a-century pandemic.” We will all pay the price for this willful ignorance of facts, and we have long stopped even considering the moral side of these challenges.
My daughter is seeing this on her campus, which is allowing doctoral students back to labs based on “seniority.” The closer you are to completing your PhD, the earlier you can get back. She’s third in line, hoping to be able to resume her dissertation data gathering later this summer.
No country in the world has been able to do this while allowing spread among younger people. If we do it, we’ll be the first.
Just because colleges come up with different solutions than you does not mean they are not facing the biological and moral reality of the pandemic. Also, many consider a pandemic likely to reoccur with new viruses again in this century
Pretty much all experts believe that.