One of the problems is that colleges like UCLA have historically housed students in some triples and even quads so now they are going with singles and maybe some doubles. They just don’t have the dorm space for all these undergrads.
What a shame that our two public flagships, some of the best public universities in the world, cannot find a way to get all their freshman onto campus, for at least their first year of college…
Maybe, but so many dorms are hall style, with a bathroom per floor so still not private even if all are in singles. I also think putting students in solitude is bad for their mental health.
Then, driving more kids off campus and likely into a denser living situation (in crowded expensive urban areas like UCLA) than they would have had in doubles seem counterproductive.
And there’s more…when more students are off campus, the college loses control of an even greater proportion of students, and more off campus apartments equals a greater number of sites for off campus parties. I struggle to see the sense of it all.
Edited to add: maybe that’s what some colleges want: more students off-campus so they can say we can’t control those students who aren’t in on-campus housing, so not our fault should there be an outbreak. Who knows?
Schools might not have to post guards at off campus housing. In this day of social media, the school may discover that Joe is out of his room and Sally ran down to Target to pick up a few things when they post it to FB or Twitter or the other dozen places do.
That is mostly how Hawaii discovered the guests who were not taking the 14 days seriously.
WRT the UCLA announcement, I thought it was for families who live locally. I can understand an expectation under the circumstances that those kids would live with their families to leave the campus housing for out-of-towners. Certainly we would be expecting such a situation for a Boston-area school and our children.
How does a freshman from outside of CA, get to LA to look for an apartment right now? And do they know anyone to live with? We know three kids from our high school outside of Chicago committed to UCLA. I hope they can take a gap year. They were SO excited to be accepted and head out there this year. This stinks.
In addition to it being impossible for the OOS freshmen to figure that all out, I wouldn’t even let my 17 or 18 year old live off campus freshman year for any college.
Reread my original post about UCLA. Local Los Angeles freshman (maybe other classes too?) will have to live at home or get off campus apartments. If you are OOS or region you have housing on campus.
With that said, I don’t know how many freshman are local but I’m sure it’s 500+ as there are at least a dozen going from my D20’s HS alone.
Don’t know about whether they are allowing many gap years, my gut is not many.
I have read rumors (parents sharing changes to housing contracts) that several well known public Florida schools are also doing this. WCU is the only one I could find publically available info on. I hope this doesn’t become a trend.
bearpanther—
Thank you for sharing. That is exactly what I am worried about. My son’s college has already mentioned “single room” and “hotels” but hasn’t mentioned “dorm priority”. No way his school can house students on campuses like usual years. School’s off-campus housing (hotels) can be far enough just to get a meal on time at campus cafeteria which will probably have limited hours / service / social distance. He will be sophomore. But I do understand that freshmen should have priority to live on-campus dorm. He and his friend are very interested in renting an apartment in their choice and cook own meals but they still need to get an approval from school if sophomore can be allowed to live by themselves.
My son and his roommate won’t be able to fly in for apartment hunting so they have to do all online. Some towns are super competitive to find a decent apartment even for adults with a good income. It is going to be very challenging. Some metro-area colleges, especially large ones sound like hinting to encourage many students to live in their home town and take online classes…
Note that this was for students who live in Los Angeles (the LA in UCLA). The expectation is that students who already live near the campus can commute from where they live now for any classes or labs that are on-campus. That may not be true for every student who currently lives in Los Angeles, but if there is not enough dorm space for reduced density and accommodating all frosh, having the local frosh commute from where they are now is one of the better ways to “ration” the dorm space (i.e. so that non-local students won’t have to look for off-campus housing in an unfamiliar area for their first year).
I don’t see the problem with requiring local students to commute. I have seen schools do this when they underestimated yield & over enrolled for available dorm space.
I’ve seen several posts citing how unfair it is that a roommate of a covid case would have to isolate. So maybe the colleges don’t want to have to deal with that.
I don’t expect my kid to purposely break the rules, but there are different considerations when you live off campus. First of all, you are responsible for your own food. The school food service isn’t going to be driving all over town dropping off food for quarantined students who aren’t even on a food plan. Knowing my son, if he got a call telling him he has to quarantine for 14 days, the first thing he’d think is “I better go shopping and get enough food”, and he’d probable immediately head out to the grocery store. Then, he would have to come out of his room to prepare food when he was hungry, and to use the bathroom, which is shared with other roommates. I also expect him to go to the living room to watch TV while he’s stuck inside. He’s not a bad kid, but the on campus type quarantine where the school drops off food and fresh linens to the room and the kid never leaves it isn’t going to happen for off campus kids.
It is if the college has a quarantine hotel for quarantined students.
@Mwfan1921 wrote:
Sounds like we have a binary choice: Quarantine by room or quarantine the entire hall. Which is it?
In the contact tracing video I watched, the contact tracer went through all of this with the person they’d just given the bad news to.
-You can’t leave your apartment.
-Uh huh.
-So, do you have enough food in your apartment?
-Oh, no, I don’t think I do.
-OK, let’s figure this out. Do you have a friend that can bring you food?
-I could go get some.
-Right, but you’re staying in your apartment. So what about a friend bringing you food?
…
And so on. Our kids are adults. They can understand how quarantine and isolation work.
@ChemAM it’s not ideal because law school classes depend on interaction between the professor and student. But many law professors I know are discussing ways to adapt their teaching styles to online teaching. And even those who plan to teach f2f know their classes will probably be streamed to students who can’t come to campus.
If anything, I’d say that the professors I know (across multiple disciplines) are more focused on their teaching than they have been for years. That’s actually a good thing for students. Whether your class is online, f2f, or some combo of both, your professors will be more engaged, more focused on the content and delivery of their courses, and more attuned to whether the class is getting it. This won’t make up for all the other losses, but it ironically may pave the way for the development of mire effective teaching methods (and super upgraded IT services) throughout institutions of higher learning.
So you think the school is going to tell off campus students, that aren’t paying for a dorm or food plan, to come stay at a “quarantine hotel” for 14 days, just because they had contact with someone. That is going to cost a lot of money. Maybe you are right, but I just can’t see that for large state schools where most kids live off campus. Do schools have the budget for that?
If someone tests positive for the virus, and it’s caught early, how many people in the dorm or floor will be deemed a close contact though? CDC defines close contact as someone who has been within 6 ft of the infected for at least 15 minutes. Not sure if that’s masked or not, or doesn’t matter.
ETA: only close contacts of an infected person have to be quarantined.
Just because they had contact with someone who was infected with a lethal disease and who might have infected them. If colleges have a quarantine area, yeah, I think they’ll quarantine students who might be infected with covid in their quarantine area. That’s what it would be for, after all.
Either they have one or two infected students, and then they have a few students in quarantine. Or they have lots of infected students and many many students who need to quarantine, because they screwed up, their test/trace/isolate strategy and their social distancing strategies have completely failed, and they have a large outbreak on their hands.
They’ve been telling us they can prevent large outbreaks. I prefer to hope that colleges are competent. They might not be, but I hope they will be. I hope they’ll be able to do what they claim they can do.
All I can say, after reading all these quarantine discussions, if that I don’t envy the people at the schools who are trying to figure out exactly how this is all going to work and what the rules will be. I guess we will all find out what they decide in the coming months.