Seriously, folks, assume next year is online, and be pleasantly surprised if you are wrong.
Current students don’t have a choice to make here. For pre-frosh, if paying for freshman year online is not palatable, change plans now.
I agree that everyone should just assume classes will be online in Fall…or some schools may have no Fall classes at all, and start in January.
But, current students do have a choice.
–They can transfer…I expect many schools will accept transfers very late into the summer, and some may have in person classes.
–They could ask for a deferral (may or may not be granted)
–They can withdraw from their current school, and transfer for second semester or Fall of 2021.
There are always choices, no student is trapped at their current school.
@twoinanddone I don’t really think they would police them like that; I think the colleges could give them money to order food with contactless delivery (so they could stay in their rooms) and they would have them sign something. I don’t think they would need to clean and sanitize the rooms until the student is well enough to leave. With regard to the issue of people getting suddenly sick, there is a phone number (like I said), and colleges can be very creative.
That’s not true, though the timeline is different. Kids that aren’t freshmen can decide to take a semester or two off if the schools go online again.
My son’s experience with online learning has not been good. He told me last night that he hadn’t learned one new thing since they were sent home at spring break. He is taking five classes. Only one of his classes was live with zoom sessions and he said that was more social time than about the subject the class was teaching. The other four were just read a power point on your own time, hand in homework or write a paper. He is only having one final. Three of the professors seemed to have just given up when it went online and haven’t done much of anything. Now admittedly if the schools go online in the fall, they will have more time to train teachers and set standards for what they should do, so it should be better, but we are seriously considering time off if it’s online again.
Agree that could be an option, but not at all schools.
Your S should check if taking a mid-stream deferral is possible. At my D’s school it’s not, she would have to withdraw…at least that’s the case as of right now.
Ok, I will concede that current students unhappy with how their school handled the online transition (or those whose subject areas are not conductive to online instruction) should consider their options as well.
Pre-frosh should find out as much as they can about how their target school handled it.
A school which takes that position is just begging for law suits since distance learning is not what students contracted for when they signed up.
Until we get some actual data that being infected actually provides some/any type of immunity, we should acknowledge that these herd immunity discussions are aspirational at best.
I’ve posted Dr. Birx’ comments previously, but I guess it bears repeating:
Another option for current students if fall is online
— They could take a part time load
However, current students also need to consider impacts on scholarships and financial aid.
However, there are also “more irreplaceable” lives in non-academic lines of work, and most college faculty are not in the “more irreplaceable” category. Given the huge talent pool of graduating PhDs every year, it should not be difficult to hire replacement faculty (either adjunct or tenure track) in most* subjects if a current faculty member is no longer available.
*There may be a few subjects where non-academic employers readily hire people with PhDs, but that does not describe most subjects that people earn PhDs in.
Expect different regions to have different solutions. I expect colleges in Texas, the Carolinas, and Georgia will resume in person class.
At least they are open to the possibility that they might still be on campus if circumstances change.
We are in a different state, but things are evolving here in a positive direction. It looks like I’ll have to go to my dental appt next week. I was hoping it would get cancelled lol (purely because I am a slacker, not because I’m concerned about going).
If the schools aren’t going to provide services to the sick students living in isolation, then they shouldn’t even get involved at all. Too much liability to provide the room but then just ignore the students.
The schools could make an arrangement with a nearby hotel to provide housing and room service to those who need to isolate, but the school should not pay for it or be involved at all.
There is a poster @cypresspat who has been caring for her hs student for more than 2 weeks. Ask her if it would be a good idea to just leave a sick 17-18 year old in a room with food being delivered for 2 weeks, with no laundry or cleaning being done for the room.
My daughter had the flu while in college. Her school did nothing except send a notice to her professors saying she wasn’t allowed on campus. They even billed her for the flu tests administered by the heath center. Schools with flu, measles, mumps outbreaks do not set up special quarantine units for students. The students go home or make their own arrangements for care.
This sounds a bit like the setup at my kid’s college for the small fraction who remained on campus. Health services had set up both a quarantine area, for testing/waiting for results, and an isolation area (in regular but empty dorm in the same building). Food was brought, communication with nursing staff by phone, regular temp checks performed by the student. Potential volume would be the issue, but the system apparently worked fine for the tiny handful that used it. (The 24/7 facility has 10 inpatient beds and sounds like a busy place in normal times. Medium-sized university.)
Thinking out loud, maybe a school’s health services resources could be a factor, albeit small, in a concerned senior’s prospective decision-making process, although we probably wouldn’t have weighed it heavily.
@momzilla2D all LACs I know of do not allow part time.
There is another complicating factor here, which is whether colleges would allow a deferral later in the summer, in the event that they announce that they are going online for the fall (or for all year, for that matter, as the same logic that applies to the fall will largely apply to spring 2021, unfortunately). My son’s top two choice schools have both been very cagey about that for the time being, which makes deciding very difficult.
@eswmom They’re only being cagey because they can’t predict what their state govt will let them do four months from now. Their answer “we’ll open if the state lets us” unfortunately doesn’t help your decision if your son wouldn’t attend if first semester is online.
Another thing though about Cal State Fullerton is it’s a public university with an in-state tuition of less than $7,000 a year, with over 90% of students coming from within the state, and 94% of students living off-campus. Therefore, they don’t rely on room and board payments to the extent that residential colleges, and tuition is already low enough to justify online classes. So they don’t have much to lose by starting online in fall.
THanks for posting that @lkg4answers. Some posters act like being concerned about on-campus living conditions and the spread of the virus is equivalent to being a helicopter parent who wants to wrap their child in bubble wrap. THat is not a helpful attitude for parents who are trying to weigh the big picture scenario based on on-going developing information about both immediate and long-term effects of Covid.
I am so sad for my D20 - the thought of going off to college in the fall is literally just about the only thing pulling her through the disappointment of all she is missing out on during the end of her senior year. I’m having a very hard time believing that she’s going to get to go in September.
We will not try to defer or take a gap semester or anything. Her financial aid package is just about full tuition, so I’m not going to grouse about paying top dollar for zoom school. I never thought I’d be praying for the opportunity to hand over mega bucks for room and board, but…here we are.