Amherst will allow anyone to leave; whether and under what conditions one returns is the question.
Colleges are not prisons, nor are they particularly eager to use their limited resources to care for your sick kids if other arrangements can be made not posing risk to their college community.
@RosePetal35
Wow! Well to answer the question you posed to @Leigh22, my child wouldn’t be going to campus because that sounds like a prison not a college campus. And if you can get expelled for leaving campus (and going remote for the remainder of the semester) because you’re ill that’s too draconian.
No one is going to get expelled for quarantining elsewhere; only if they leave while contagious and continue to hang around campus or the surrounding area clearly not following isolation practices. It does no good to make overblown threats of absurd responses. The college’s interest is keeping contagious students away from the rest of its community.
Why limit it to 18-24 year olds? Everyone in the country should go to college. Then we can test everyone, right? Oh wait. There’s that reality thing again.
The mental gymnastics about testing on college campuses the past couple days has been very amusing. Hope no one got hurt during it all. LOL
Why limit it to 18-24 year olds? Everyone in the country should go to college. Then we can test everyone, right? Oh wait. There’s that reality thing again.
The mental gymnastics about testing on college campuses the past couple days has been very amusing. Hope no one got hurt during it all. LOL
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I’m a little lost here. Are you saying that students on campuses shouldn’t have priority for testing and resources should be switched to reach the more vulnerable populations? If you want to do that, then students don’t get tested? Or are you suggesting kids should not be on campuses at all so that tests are freed up for non-students? Either way, none of this matters since neither of those scenarios will happen. Kids are on their way to school and testing is planned.
Unfortunately, “cramped housing situations that doesn’t allow for social distancing between reasonable groups of “ families”” seems to describe a significant portion of residential student housing.
Many 18-24 year old college students attend college while living at home and commuting to college.
In response to those who say they will not be bringing their sick child home or those who say that campuses should not close once they reach a certain threshold of positive cases…almost all of these students will be traveling home at Thanksgiving, and many of them may be infected at that time. They will be traveling during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year (assuming it is this year) and will be spending the holiday with their extended families.
Somewhere upthread (I think?) there was a discussion about the number of students who will be traveling to college this fall. In 2018, 428,620 freshmen traveled OOS to attend college so multiply that by four to see the full migration. That # will be down this year due to schools not allowing everyone on campus and some who elect to stay home, but that’s a lot of travel in a compressed time period. (Not as compressed as the return migration at Thanksgiving, assuming schools remain open that long.)
I know that I cannot link to Twitter here, but if you want to see graphics that show the # who travel into each state, follow James S Murphy with underscores between each name.
^^ It’s also possible that many of the students may have already caught it and recovered by the time Thanksgiving rolls around and on their way home. So they may actually have some immunity.
If the virus is still around in Thanksgiving, doubtful that extended families will be gathering also. Well, at least responsible families. Unless a vaccine is in full force.
On one hand, I am a little confused myself. I started off today in this thread saying that my point when I initially raised what some apparently think was meant to lead to “specific privilege bashing” [such wonderful phrases come from this site] wasn’t that at all, people here today, just like they did yesterday, kept wanting to talk about testing levels on college campuses. Maybe I should have been more clear yesterday but today I was very clear. Yet the talk continued today about testing levels. As I noted this morning, I thought that was actually quite telling that it happened yesterday. Even more so today. I will admit though it became something of a psychology experiment to see how far the mental gymnastics would go. As it turns out even farther than I would have guessed (and based on experiences on this site over the years I guessed they would go far). So in that way, I am not confused by responses here.
As I also noted this morning that my question really was what would parents do if the promised testing regimens on their kid’s campuses didn’t pan out. One person responded to that question (responding because its a math issue she thinks its unlikely but not impossible that promised testing levels won’t be delivered – note that isn’t totally answering the question of what happens if promised testing isn’t delivered – something which she said is possible though not likely – but hey its a response). Given all of the talk about testing plans from the colleges and discussions here with so many parents about those testing plans and comparing testing plans at different schools, I thought it would be interesting to hear what parents will do if those testing levels (turnaround times as well) aren’t delivered as promised. Maybe the answer is no one cares; the promise/plan is enough. Seems unlikely given what I know about many people on this site. But maybe so.
@Faithabove – Absolutely true that some students will have contracted and recovered, but others will be infected, perhaps asymptomatically, and can infect other travelers along their routes home.
While I agree that responsible families will not gather at Thanksgiving, I fear many still will. Probably the same people who are posting vacation photos on Facebook at the moment.
I don’t know enough about vaccines to address this properly, but I thought that any vaccine will require two doses, so I am guessing that even a vaccine announced by Election Day will not provide protection by Thanksgiving.
Then maybe the students traveling by plane should be allowed to be tested and quarantine themselves while awaiting results before getting on a plane or other public conveyance. Those driving home by self or with their own pod would not be as much of an issue. Hopefully, the schools will also consider a staggered departure time for their students. Will be curious to see which schools will allow this.
Of course, same student could be infected on a plane by a fellow traveler (business person, vacationer, etc) who got on plane without testing self and quarantining before travel. So they will bring home the virus and presumably families/pods should be treating anyone coming into their pod with the same protocols - try to quarantine/isolate person if possible before intermixing with rest of family/pod. Not possible of course with cramped housing.
Some vaccines require one dose, some require two doses, and some require three or more doses. Two doses is relatively common among typical adult vaccines.
@Faithabove – Good luck with managing the logistics of a pre-departure 14 day quarantine!
I haven’t seen anything about staggered departures for students, but where classes are not meeting F2F, there is nothing to stop the student from departing on own schedule, as long as travel will not result in missing a synchronous lecture. Realistically, I think we will see hundreds of thousands of college students departing in the space of four or five days. No idea how many will fly vs drive.
Thanks @ucbalumnus. Do you have any idea how long before immunity is conferred for a typical vaccine? I realize that no one can answer that question for a CV-19 vaccine.
@saillakeerie I think that by the time folks discover that the colleges aren’t actually doing the testing as promised, it’s really too late. Those who have sent their kids away to college will already be on campus and the kids won’t want to come home unless things get really bad on campus. And the tuition and room & board will already have been paid, so IMO the parents will be impacted by those sunk costs and will leave their kids on campus unless things get really bad.
From my personal viewpoint, I appreciate talking about how unlikely it is that colleges can deliver what they are promising. I feel like my D’s school has over-promised and has been so incredibly light on the details. I’m upset that students had to make an election to go back, and to be on campus or remote before any important details were revealed. And that students have been lulled into thinking there would be lots of timely testing since the school Pres has been stumping about how important this is, when in fact the school doesn’t have its act together about this. I’m beyond shocked that all my D’s friends are going back on campus and think that they are going to have an almost normal year. My fondest hope is that enough parents wake up and smell the coffee and push back so school would go on-line only. But that’s pure fantasy on my part since the school Pres is at the leading forefront of the push to have kids at college this Fall.
Our son’s college is like so many others as it has an extensive plan, but many of the details are vague especially with testing.
I feel like this is one giant experiment with colleges moving forward purely on wishful thinking. Students and even parents buy into this thinking and believe things will be business as usual. I’ve read discussions on the parent FB page about family weekends and football games with no thought that maybe they won’t happen. Meanwhile I am wondering how long it will take for a major outbreak to occur and what that might mean in terms of quarantining. But if you talk about these concerns you’ll be shut down over being too negative.
I’m short-term pessimistic, and long-term optimistic.
In the short term, I agree with@AsMother: I think there will be outbreaks on campuses, and that students will return home. I suspect that campuses will be forced to close for the fall.
Though young people tend to have less severe outcomes, they are taught by older people. Also, their halls of residence are cleaned by janitors, and their food is served by cafeteria employees, and their security is provided by adult security officers. Who will teach the students once the staff get sick?
Testing, of course, is important, but it is predicated on a low amount of circulating virus. When the forest is on fire, detecting sparks doesn’t add much.
It’s hard not to have a normality bias. We tend to think things are normal, and don’t recognize that the world has changed. We are in the midst of a pandemic. There is wide-spread, community transmission. I would like nothing better than to get back to normal, but this is going to be a fall like no other in our lifetime.
Long-term, the prospects of a vaccine seem encouraging. If this came on-line as quickly as hoped (late this year or early next year) then things can begin to get back to normal next year.
@roycroftmom @vpa2019 Sorry, I just meant that Amherst would punish people for violating quarantine and isolation rules, including disobeying quarantine. If a sick kid really wanted to leave, and their parent could pick them up, they probably could leave and go home; however, I highly doubt they would let people with COVID go back into their original dorm with the general population to move their stuff out. They would have to wait until their parent got into town, then just walk off-campus and into their parent’s car to go home. If there was stuff the person absolutely needed, I’m sure there would be someway to retrieve that. Also, I’m sure they could not return to campus afterwards, as anybody can leave the college at any point in the semester if they feel uncomfortable, however, if it is not for extenuating circumstances, they will not be allowed to return. Also, in this circumstance, I highly doubt they would be refunding room and board.
However, I think they said there will be security guards/ACPD around campus who will be on the lookout for any non-students and make sure kids aren’t leaving campus without prior permission from the Office of Student Affairs (you can leave for doctor’s appointments, family emergencies, and the like, but only after you receive approval from the Office of Student Affairs; they have added a campus store to minimize need to travel off-campus).
Also, not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but Cornell changed their off-campus quarantine policy; previously, they were putting students from high-risk states in a hotel and testing them prior to move-in, but now, anybody from a state that’s not exempt by NY’s travel order (so basically every state outside the Northeast and even some within the Northeast) has to find their own housing arrangements in NY or another state exempt from NY’s travel order for 14 days to quarantine. They are asking people who cannot quarantine for 14 days up there to wait to move in. There might be funding for students on financial aid, I don’t know. My niece, who is starting at Cornell in the fall. will be staying in either a hotel room or an Airbnb with her mother in NY for two weeks prior to move-in.