Honestly, I had no idea that internships this summer were face to face anywhere. Everything I read pointed to jobs being moved to remote. Every student I know had their internship remotely too. (And I have a Purdue junior living next door to us.)
@circuitrider how so? One campus full and the other empty.
Well, in the sense that you can have a campus full of people taking courses remotely. That’s was the UNC model until a few hours ago.
Ah. I guess I was comparing a school (Harvard) that is not bringing kids to campus versus one that is.
I will be curious to see what happens with these schools having kids in the dorms and some in-person classes if they switch to all remote class. There was chatter earlier this summer that they would just let kids stay in the dorms for fear of sending them all back to their hometowns. Now, though, ND says it’s not out of the question that they could close dorms and UNC is trying to get kids to go home too.
Methinks you have not been to Trinity campus. Despite its religious beginnings it is purely secular and a lot of partying happened there before covid. Hardly monastic. I would not describe Wes as monastic either. And not all NESCACS are remote. Tufts, Trinity, Wesleyan and CT College are urban. All 11 NESCACS are however all committed to welcoming students on to their campuses in one form or another and view purely online education as not part of their ethos.
Again, using Ivys and super prestigious schools as the metric… there are more colleges ‘up the street’ that are opening campus this fall than not.
Trying to get back to a new normal will force innovation rather than sitting at home waiting for people to come up with ideas. Look at some of the Canadian schools that already decided Spring will be online too. They don’t want to spend money or resources trying to get in person to work, they are throwing in the towel. The magical thinking on this thread is that everything will be fine for the spring and this is just 1 semester. Hopefully thats true, but likely not. My kids didn’t sign up for 3 semesters (or more) of online college, and they can’t afford (mentally) to take a ‘gap year’ and sit at home doing. Elementary students will lose more than 3 semesters of learning by being online, never mind the people who work at these schools. We need to come up with innovative ways to live with the virus.
Many kids I know that have summer internships had them in person. I’d say 50/50.
@suzyQ7 What I’m saying is why would schools invent ways to get back to school this fall when we will have much better info fairly soon? Why go back to school when all we know is wear a mask and keep distant? Add on that testing isn’t ramped up enough to make a difference and, for most colleges, it’s not time to go back to campus yet. Don’t we think that, even short of a vaccine, we will have more info in the next 6-12 months that will allow kids back on campus in a much better way than what they are faced with now?
Why “force innovation” for a situation that’s likely to change soon. We should have better, faster testing and better therapeutics and possibly a vaccine by fall 2021. Any innovation used to go back to school this month will be obsolete in 12 months.
Fairly soon? Do you have some intel we don’t know about? We were supposed to have daily testing and apps that anonymously tracked/notified people that came within 6 feet by now and we have none of that. As a matter of fact, testing got worse after June (but is now better). Government has decided to go all in on funding the vaccine ‘warp speed’, and the rest has fallen by the wayside. If that bet fails, then we will be in a holding pattern indefinitely. Which is what you are proposing. I can’t even fathom the damage that will be done if small children and college students only go back to in person fall of 2021 - physical, emotional, and financial. The layoffs will be epic, closings rampant.
No, I do not think so, @homerdog. I think fall 2021 will look just like this-masks, social distancing, and a somewhat effective vaccine still on the horizon. I have no reason to believe the situation will change soon, nor do the doctors I know.
Despite the doom and gloom tone, I feel this is the most important part of the nu president’s letter:
It is my understanding that the vast majority of nu upperclassmen live off campus. Additionally, the freshmen who were supposed to be in Europe for the first semester have been placed in off campus apartments. nu, bu and bc are all under pressure (rightly so) from their surrounding communities. the nu president is arguing that by instituting a rigorous testing program nu is working to reduce the spread not only on campus, but in the surrounding community. In other words, the students are coming here whether we are remote or in person, we recognize this and are instituting testing to help control the spread of COVID.
I think a big reason that this was written was to address the locals. I am not sure why he just didn’t submit it to the Boston Globe.
I can’t believe I’m agreeing with you:)…but I’m agreeing with you because that is exactly what I’m focused on now. The students spreading the virus to college campus workers by their presence has always been my concern, not the students getting sick themselves. So while there is no hard data on what % of 18 - 24 yo who contract the virus have symptoms that require anything more than otc medication because we don’t have real reliable data on how many have had it, and we know it is the superspreader events that causes the vast majority of virus spread (young people congregating without following protocols, in the case of kids returning to college, and I’m not sure a lot of campus workers are showing up at those)…posters here seem downright thrilled to say that no college campus - regardless of measures taken - should have students on it because they are all doomed to cause death or significant bodily harm to campus communities. I am going to follow the data.
Before the pandemic online education for K-12 was regarded as an aspirational resource where bright children could accelerate and not be bound by a limited curriculum in f2f schools. On this site it was very common to see 17 year olds studying multi variable calculus that way.
I hope that the new normal will take us back to seeing the benefit of flexibility and allowing for personalised curriculum that online learning allows for and not a poor substitute for f2f.
I agree with him. Young people are NOT going to sit home for 2 years, period. So even if they are not ‘on campus’ they will gathering off campus or in other places (just like the children of posters here!). MUCH MUCH better for the community to have them routinely tested at college
The Boston Globe has a horrible paywall that doesn’t allow any free views. Plus the Post is more national and I think this is a conversation that needs to be had nationally.
Better therapeutics will be great, but they will not allow us to stop social distancing and wearing masks…students (and everyone else) will still have to do those things because even with good treatments we can’t let the virus spread uncontrolled, nor will any treatment work for every person, and any treatment will likely be supply constrained, at least for awhile.
Same with a vaccine, if one is works and is approved…because it will take a while for enough people to be vaccinated to have herd immunity (so will still need masks and SD). We have yet to hear any distribution plan as to how we will get those 18+ years old vaccinated, with two injections 4 weeks apart. Only 18+ because below 18 ages aren’t even in the Phase III vaccine trials (at least the 3 that have started in the US).
Would love to hear from some attorneys whether colleges will be able to require people to receive a vaccine that has no long-term safety data. I hope so, but that seems like it’s a slippery slope.
Lots of tough choices still ahead.
I agree that it seems unwise to invest too heavily now in reopening campuses for the fall or even spring semester. UNC is the canary in the coal mine about how students will behave and how spread will happen. Now they are asking all students to move out by the 30th with exemptions for hardship, international, and, of course, athletes.
There might not be a cure or a vaccine widely available within a year but I bet treatments will improve and perhaps we will have a better national strategy for dealing with it. We will know more about spread and effects of the virus (what year-long impacts are still there?). This giant rush to open instead of schools standing together to all offer remote learning will bite them. They had an opportunity to place public health above securing as many enrollments as they could gobble up- sadly many schools choose the later.
Aoun wanted to reach a national audience. Also Northeastern and The Boston Globe have not been on good terms for the past couple of years.
UConn cracking down on partying kids and kicking them out of the dorms, now there’s an idea…
This study shows a decrease of the virus to Healthcare workers when wearing face shields with masks. My son will be given one and don’t know if he will use it when around people closely even with 6 foot spacing. Just something to think about. Many inexpensive ones on Esty. Ars Technica: Plastic face shields do masks one better.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/plastic-face-shields-do-masks-one-better/
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I think that while all of the homeschooling and learning pods are a valiant effort to keep kids learning and socially connected, they will prove to be a lot more effort than parents can sustain over time, and will not provide a better education than the public schools.
I think parents will flock back to schools when covid is no longer an issue, and there may even be a new appreciation and the political will to strengthen the schools.
Yes, but only if enough people get the vaccine. Various polls show concerningly high numbers of people who say they might not get a vaccine.
Here’s one poll…35% say they won’t get a vaccine. https://news.gallup.com/poll/317018/one-three-americans-not-covid-vaccine.aspx
The 65% that do will help decrease spread, but it will take a long time to get 65% of adults vaccinated. And we still won’t have vaccinated those who can’t get a vaccine due to other health conditions, or the 25% of our population that is under 18 (which is not good for K-12 openings).
@suzyQ7 said:
“I agree with him. Young people are NOT going to sit home for 2 years, period. So even if they are not ‘on campus’ they will gathering off campus or in other places (just like the children of posters here!). MUCH MUCH better for the community to have them routinely tested at college”
Not many colleges are “routinely testing” and that was part of my point. Why go back to campus until we get enough quick tests to make testing a real way to help contain the virus. All of these schools testing only symptomatic students or testing upon arrival but then just randomly after that are wasting money. Those plans do not keep the virus from spreading and very few colleges have the resources to test everyone often enough. Maybe a quick test is coming and that will help kids go back in a safer way.