According to D20, Duke has extended their gap year deadline from May 15 to June 15 to give students more time to decide.
Apparently the college will be making an announcement about fall in-person class instruction June 1 which will allow students to make a decision about taking a gap year or not. Very interesting.
Amherst also said they would be making their decision sometime in June.
Could mean both of the following:
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If this is the dream school, I would stay. Look at the whole 4 year experience. My D will be a freshman at an out of state (10 driving hours away) school, and I
How fatal does it need to be? 500 people died yesterday in NY and 300 in NJ, and those are low numbers.
Note that some of these arguments are based on the idea that we have to either wait for a vaccine or go back to normal and let people get whatever effects COVID-19 has.
However, knowledge about COVID-19 does not stay static. It is not vaccine or bust. It is entirely possible that it may be too risky to fully reopen everything including colleges now (and even if everything were fully reopened, many people would still be afraid to go back to normal), but it may not be at some future time before a vaccine is ready, due to greater knowledge of the numbers and risks (currently very incomplete due to lack of testing) and potential findings in medicine that make avoiding bad outcomes* of COVID-19 more likely and predictable (instead of being viewed as a lottery with some weighting based on pre-existing risk factors) with effective observation and treatment protocols.
*Death is one bad outcome, but others include need for hospitalization, or long term damage to lungs, heart, blood vessels, kidneys, nervous system, etc…
In other words:
Today: getting infected looks like a lottery of unknown odds, and if you are infected, the chance of a bad outcome looks like a lottery of unknown odds.
Possible near future scenario: the risk of getting infected is fairly well defined, and if you feel sick, you can easily be tested for COVID-19, and there is an effective observation and treatment protocol that will make the risk of a bad outcome very low.
It would not be surprising if colleges were much more confident in reopening in-person under the possible near future scenario, if such a thing happens, than under today’s conditions. Presumably, they are waiting and hoping for such a scenario, or parts of it, so that they can make better informed decisions instead of just guessing.
Governments and individuals would also likely feel more confident in that possible near future scenario than under today’s conditions.
Yes, hopefully there will be more useful information and circumstances 6 weeks from now when colleges need to make final decisions about the fall. When you think about how far we have come in the past 6 weeks and how much information changes from week to week, I do believe we may be in a very different position by June, and hopefully that will make it clearer for the administrations in their decision making (my heart goes out to them).
I am crossing my fingers and toes that this is already far more widespread that we think (based on that USC study showing 55x-80x actual more cases than the confirmed cases numbers we are looking at. In the US, we are currently at almost a million confirmed cases, and should hit 1 million in about one week. If this study can be extrapolated to the whole US (and I know it was just from one location in California, so it really can’t), that would imply that perhaps 55 to 80 million Americans will have already been exposed, which is approximately 15-25% of our population. This would get us closer to herd immunity (especially since this happened in just 3 months January to April—if the exposures double in the next three months, perhaps by July we will have 30-50% of our population exposed??), but it also would give us all perhaps a bit less anxiety about the virus. It is true that it is absolutely horrific hearing from the doctors in the hotspots about the unprecedented deaths they are seeing. But on an individual level, I think we might all worry less if we thought the odds of bad outcomes were drastically lower than current numbers suggest. It is hard to reconcile those two things.
I believe that within 6 weeks we will have more studies that give a better sense of the number of exposures across the US, so we won’t just rely on that USC study. I also think/hope that testing will be far more widespread (both swab testing for current cases and the testing for antibodies). I think we will know more about the testing accuracy. My own little state with just 1 million total population is performing over 2000 swab tests per day right now, up from barely any at all 6 weeks ago.
I have a hard time picturing on-campus school in the fall, but I am forcing myself to remain optimistic!
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@ucbalumnus – don’t know how to do the quote thing – but YES to this that you wrote:
"Today: getting infected looks like a lottery of unknown odds, and if you are infected, the chance of a bad outcome looks like a lottery of unknown odds.
Possible near future scenario: the risk of getting infected is fairly well defined, and if you feel sick, you can easily be tested for COVID-19, and there is an effective observation and treatment protocol that will make the risk of a bad outcome very low."
My elaboration:
Treatments are improving every week – amazing sharing going on among HCW and of course drug treatment studies.
Testing and contact tracing (when will a contact tracing app be avail to colleges?) will control outbreaks much more effectively. This is the current logjam that is so frustrating, but it too is improving – my state has seen 50% increase in testing over last 12 days so, progress! Question: can colleges get access to enough tests by Aug?
Colleges (and all businesses) are developing plans for continued social distancing when things do re-open, while the reality is the most vulnerable will need to stay home. For example, an immunocompromised faculty zooms into to teach students who are on campus. When students go back, it will be different – mask wearing, no sports and parties for a while, big classes will be split up or go online, etc.
I think these are the prongs and plans that colleges are watching and weighing right now as they evaluate options.
So encouraging to hear about Amherst’s creating thinking. I imagine all colleges are talking with their peers right now.
Here’s where it gets tricky: if a student is notified that they were in contact with someone who tests positive, they get tested immediately. If they are negative, it seems like there should be ‘extra’ measures they take for at least a week until incubation period is over. Like avoiding public places as much as possible? At my D’s small LAC with a strong honor code, I think kids would do this. But self-isolation for two weeks for anyone in contact might not be feasible or necessary, esp. if everyone is wearing masks when out. I don’t know…
After reading Amherst’s list of how things might change, I’m still wondering how many kids will take a pass. Masks, no parties, maybe meals only to go, no fall sports. S19 says being home online is school with none of the fun. That scenario that Amherst lays out still seems like school with no fun. His online classes have been pretty good. These changes on campus seem like it might even make the classes worse than online. Kids spread out in class with masks on? Ugh.
There’s going to be a lot to consider here. The decision could be leave of absence versus a much lesser on-campus experience.
The problem is how does a student keep up with their course work? If they are required to self-isolate for 1-2 weeks they’d be missing a significant amount of their courses of which it might not be possible to makeup. At my son’s school the semester is 62 instructional days. Missing 5-10 would be huge.
@gwnorth – Agree. Record all classes? Give them an N95 mask? I don’t know.
@homerdog – Yes, tough decisions. My D is an introvert and doesn’t need a big social scene to be happy. I’m pretty sure she’d go back under almost any conditions they’d provide.
Some interesting points here…
I think it will be difficult, financially, for any university to cancel the fall semester entirely. I don’t see how anyone beside Harvard could take the financial hit. The universities have to pay the staff either way, or lay them off.
If you change the question to ‘how might a face-to-face Fall semester be possible?’ you get to the masks and gloves situation, with social distancing. It, too, has problems. One, as suggested in another post, is that it doesn’t sound like much fun - and I would suspect it would be difficult to enforce. Two, what happens when a student comes down with Covid? Do you shut down the class? Close the dorm? What if a professor gets Covid?
All of this is points to the online solution. The risk with online is that it may end up being an over-reaction.
I guess the question is whether social distancing will still be necessary in the fall.
Really, I think we all have to get used to the fact that life in general won’t be “fun” for a long time, whether you are in school, in work or (worst of all) unemployed.
Previous generations coped with existential risk, whether it was being sent to war, getting polio and other fatal diseases, etc. I doubt that was “fun” for them.
@homerdog I have to disagree with you. I think being with your friends from a small distance on-campus would be much more fun than staying at home. And they said nothing about making all meals to-go. Also, given their tone towards a gap semester/year last night, I find it very hard to believe they would approve a leave of absence.
@ChemAM I don’t think schools can force you to stay and not approve leave of absences. That would be extremely distasteful and leave parents and students with a very bad view of the school. These small LACs are all about personalizing the experience and alumni give a ton of money back to these types of schools because they loved their time there. If any NESCAC says a student flat out cannot take a semester off, that’s bad for business.
@twoin18 yep but we are paying for this experience and want S19 to have six more semesters of what we expected. If taking time off gives him a better chance of having a full experience, it has to be considered. Things could be way better in January. And really should be much better in fall 2021.
It’s not all about fun. I shouldn’t have made it sound like that. Looks like there could be no XC season which is his main source of socializing and all of his EC time. Without his sport and with all of these changes, the on-campus experience isn’t even close to what he experienced this last fall.
We would leave it up to him if kids can go back to campus. He will have to weigh the pros and cons.
@homerdog Technically, they can do anything they want. Some schools (though I will concede I have not heard of any LACs doing this yet) have already stated they will not approve any gap semester/year or leave of absence requests related to COVID-19 for the upcoming academic year. And it may be worse for business if almost nobody paid for tuition fall semester because most people took time off. The thing with Amherst is that it is so prestigious that no matter what, they would be able to fill their classes and still have plenty of money no matter what happens. When people asked about whether they could take time off last night, they did not answer the question and said they thought it would be an unwise decision for students to do that.
A lot of students and their families are contemplating whether to take a gap year. Here’re a few reasons why that may not be a good idea:
No one knows when the spread will be under control. The next quarter or year may not be any better.
If the virus isn’t under control this fall, there won’t be many good opportunities for students taking a gap year.
If a large portion of college bound students take gap year this fall, they will likely have to compete, not only with each other, but also with next year’s high school graduates for all sorts of opportunities, including career opportunities, down the road.
Delaying graduation by a year (or even a semester) has significant economic cost over a student’s lifetime.
I can understand why it would be unwise. Students like to be part of a cohort going thru the same experiences at the same time. If your friends move on and are juniors and you are still a sophomore due to leave of absence, you miss something.
I guess each family/student has to make the choice that makes sense for them. My D19 will be living with her roommate at her college town. Her roommate has the same idea and called her to ask if she would be living with her in the fall, even for online learning. That’s exactly what she had hoped to hear.
Years from now, this fall semester is just be a spec in their life. 1 out of the 6 semesters living with her roommate during the pandemic doing distance learning, or 1 out of the 7 semesters living at home missing who knows what. She can’t imagine putting her college life on hold if she can help it. The boredom and the sense of being left behind (or abandon her friends) would be far worse for her than dealing with it head on with her friends and roommate.