Thank you @ProfSD ! That’s what I’ve been saying. Colleges and their faculty and staff are working hard right now, so just because people are not seeing detailed plans, doesn’t mean they are not working on them. All detailed plans have to have an online component to be viable for fall 2020.
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Oxford, which seems to know as much about the virus as anyone since they are progressing on a vaccine, is opening for f2f tutelage for undergrads. I don’t think MIT has some secret source of information or funding not available to Oxford, but rather made the decision to triage the off site learning opportunities. Some class will experience on site the least, it may as well be incoming frosh. It actually makes some sense, rather than the current, invested students. Easiest for admissions to plan around frosh attrition or transfers. Faculty doesn’t know them yet, they aren’t doing research or helpful to them.
See again, there’s a bias there. “triage the harm” “suffer the most” - I totally disagree with those assessments! And I’m not the only one. Please stop making these statements unless qualified by your understanding that it’s a matter of opinion, when it’s about a school your child is not even attending.
To the extent that there is virus transmission through surface contamination, the elevator walls at the corners the people have been breathing at seem like the riskier things to touch. Maybe less so if masks are required in the elevators.
Students were not asked “do you prefer online or on campus”. That would be a silly question to ask. Of course everyone prefers on campus. What they were asked is “will you enroll under scenario 1/2/3” and for some scenarios, “will you live in MIT housing”
You can review the survey here:
This, of course, was not a referendum, but a set of data points, one of many.
“April 21, 2020
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Purdue University, for its part, intends to accept students on campus in typical numbers this fall, sober about the certain problems that the COVID-19 virus represents, but determined not to surrender helplessly to those difficulties but to tackle and manage them aggressively and creatively.”
https://www.purdue.edu/president/messages/campus-community/2020/2004-fall-message.php
In deference to your opinion, I have,amended my post to make off site learning be value neutral, @fretfulmother
@roycroftmom - thank you! I actually think there’s something to your point, that freshmen haven’t acclimated yet to campus, and they can be welcomed/oriented for real at a later date as they join the in-person community. Which supports what I was saying before, that it’s going to be just fine to have freshmen remote-learning this fall.
Harvard and MIT have not decided yet either, but it does look like none of HYMPS will have a full return to campus for undergrads.
That is the point I made upthread, about inverse correlation between decision speed and strength of financial and reputational position.
Duke and Vandy, from what I understand, just published their decisions, so that sorta proves my point.
My DS was admitted to Vandy with full tuition merit. We decided to pay a lot more $$$ for MIT instead. They ended up admitting 39% more applicants in their RD round than last year. Must have seen the writing on the wall. Meanwhile MIT had a record yield (79%) - with no binding rounds, mind you.
So it’s a question of degrees. Would Vandy close if it went online? Unlikely. Would it hurt a lot more than Harvard would? I think so.
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Accidentally posted draft from this morning.
Can we stop acting as if MIT is the only institution that has “scientific geniuses on hand”? While I understand the economic disaster piece of this equation, it’s problematic (at best) to act as if other institutions would make the same call to go online if they just had intelligent people at the school that really understood what is going on. HYMPS are not the only places where brilliant minds work.
The elitism is over-the-top. (And I have 3 degrees from Ivies so this is not sour grapes.)
I did not mean to imply that MIT has a monopoly on scientific genius, and I don’t think you’d find that in my CC history at all! The difference is whether an institution allows those voices to be dominant without a lot of politics or $$ worries to cloud the issues.
As a professor at a mid level institution, I just want to point out that the decisions to go online or return to f2f teaching are in our respective administration’s court. Faculty have had NO say in this decision - and that is the experience of my peers at other schools. And no-one I know is saying that s/he wants to bring back grad students or upperclassmen because said students are more “useful” than entering students. If anything, most of us are more worried about entering students and how best to keep them safe and engaged.
While I appreciate the sentiment, at many schools a lot of the lab work and research projects are undertaken by graduate students. That is presumably why Harvard, for example, welcomed back its arts and science grad students but not it’s law or business school students ( who are on average older and more likely to live in apartments).
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Schools will not kick students out of dorms and stop food service like they did in the Spring. That caused costly refunds. This year they will allow students to stay and eat boxed meals with everything on campus closed. Once you go home you can’t come back. There will be a few exceptions, but this is how it’s going to be if there is another surge in cases.
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Once a student starts school in the fall it will be impossible to take a gap year or transfer until fall of 2021. They’re locked in to pay tuition and the school knows it. Yes there will be a few students that will drop out, but that will be rare.
@roycroftmom I attended Harvard Law School. The reason HLS is going to remote teaching has nothing to do with research. Many professors there rely on RA’s too. The reason law schools and other professional schools have to go either fully or partially online is that there is no way to socially distance large classes. At most law schools, the typical first year class can have 60-80 students. Breaking up so many classes into sections is extremely difficult. Hence, the move to online or partial online instruction.
But again, this isn’t the choice of the faculty. This is driven largely by location, space, the learning model, the amount of Covid in the area, and fears about student retention. No-one I know has ever said, “let’s bring students back to campus so they can help me expedite my projects.”
I fully agree with you on number one. I just meant that if they kick students off-campus (which I think is extremely unlikely) they have to partially refund room and board in proportion to when they were kicked out.
But students can also take gap semesters, and I don’t know about other colleges, but at Amherst this past year, we had until early January to decide if we wanted to take the semester off.
I think colleges not bringing everyone back is just a matter of not having space. Loyola Chicago just announced only two classes can come back to campus. I believe they said freshmen and seniors. The dorm rooms are small so have to be singles. There’s just not a lot of options for the school near campus to get other housing. Maybe the same for MIT? Harvard? I’ve been to both of those schools and it does seem like there wouldn’t be a lot of options for extending housing off campus. Grinnell could be facing the same thing even though the school is so rural. Maybe there’s just no where to spread the kids out.
Richmond is allowing doubles. They determined a room square footage that will allow doubles to work. So, maybe colleges with larger square footage rooms can get more kids on campus. I’ve seen photos of some Harvard dorms and they are crazy small.
@Auntlydia So my mom is a lawyer, and as such, she said she is shocked Harvard Law is moving to remote learning because she said the class format is so in-your-face that she can’t imagine it working well online. Would you agree with that?
Stories like this don’t provide much reassurance: