School in the 2020-2021 Academic Year & Coronavirus (Part 1)

Parents Forum
16982

My D also has most of her courses in person. Average age of professors is young at Purdue. Older profs and those with medical conditions were able to choose to work remotely.

Big lectures are remote with in person recitations with the TAs. I think the older the student, the more they have in person because courses get smaller. Purdue also prioritized lab courses to be in person.

My d is a junior and it seems like engineering, nursing, flight, pharmacy, and most of the other stem majors are mostly in person for her cohort.

16983

Yes. Thanks for cleaning that up @circuitrider. I should have said 3 out of 4 of HER courses, like I did in my previous post on 9/5. (It was late and I was tired from reading 4 days of missed posts.) 75% of Hamilton’s classes are not in person, as my 3/4 suggested. I actually don’t know the number. She is a first year student and her largest course is 20. (No large intros. That will shift next semester with Econ.) Her fourth course is fully remote. D did get lucky. Her roommate has one fully in person, one hybrid, and two remote. Though she seems to be enjoying college as well, despite having two courses remote.

My point was not about the number of courses in person. It was about the larger claim that some posters make concerning college experiences this fall, particularly for first years. I was simply explaining how she is in fact enjoying college, even with the lack of parties.

16984

As always, we can go to the data: About 40% of all college students (Part-time, full-time etc) are 18-21, around another 40% are 25+. 2018 data from here: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_303.40.asp

Also a very good infographic here, shows 46% of students live on-campus, among other measures: https://postsecondary.gatesfoundation.org/what-were-learning/todays-college-students/

16985

“The average age for a college student is 26. Most college students are not 18-22, that’s a big misunderstanding, maybe 20% are. This thread oozes judgment, it’s concerning, it really is. If covid reduces or eliminates the residential dorm system, that’s probably a good thing. “

@theloniusmonk but then you counter this judgment with your own! It’s concerning, it really is.

16986

I think a lot hinges on gaining trust in the testing. Maybe Hamilton administration has a lot of faith in the 2x per week testing, and the faculty does also. Sounds like a VERY successful semester so far!

It is becoming clear to me that 2x a week is really working, even in city schools that are more porous to their surroundings. I think I read some top epidemiologists (not sure where, sorry) say that testing every two days with 1 day turnaround for results is sufficient to prevent spread. So, say the campus weeded out all positive cases in the first week or two during the initial quarantine phase, so you have all undergrads without covid. Then even if a kid, Joe, goes out to a gathering in the city with non-classmates and catches covid, Joe will test positive using these sensitive pCR tests before he is infectious. So Joe will be whisked off to isolation jail before he can give covid to his roommate Juan or anyone else on campus. So frequent testing doesn’t prevent you from catching covid, but prevents you from spreading it on your campus. It’s a giant luxury on these campuses for kids to know that literally everyone they are spending time with has tested negative in the past 2-3 days. I recall reading that testing 3x a week would totally work, but I imagine 2x a week is also enough to halt spread. It certainly looks like it is working in practice, seeing the results on a variety of campuses. And on more rural campuses, there are very, very few opportunities for covid to leak in anyway.

Looking at large city schools like BU and Northeastern, where it would be almost impossible to create a bubble like Hamilton can, they have had a sprinkling of positive cases, but nothing we would consider an outbreak. It looks like their 2x a week mandatory testing completely works to prevent spread.

My child’s school isn’t organizing a lot (any?) of social activities for the students, but they are providing 3x a week testing and allowing students to spend time throughout Boston, Cambridge, etc. They are not communicating a lot about their strategy, but I kind of feel like they are whispering, “ok you dummies—we can’t say this explicitly, but you are really safe—go enjoy what the area offers, following state rules. Appreciate this giant gift of testing we are giving you that enables you to know your classmates are exceptionally unlikely to have covid”. One nice side effect is that my freshman has actually taken much more advantage of Boston than their older sibling did at this point freshman year, when there were more on-campus activities.

However, I’m not hopeful that this particular school will resume in person classes until next fall, even if they get to December with no or very few student cases. Luckily the remote classes are going well for my child so far, but we’ll be glad for in-person to resume.

Sure wish the rest of us throughout the country could have such frequent testing! But good for these schools for figuring it out. And hopefully schools that aren’t doing mandatory frequent testing are figuring out how to do it for 2nd semester. Hoping the cheaper tests will help them.

16987

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/education/2020/09/30/covid-cases-college-testing-colby/3522016001/

talks about purdue and colby and how they are doing very well.

16988

Davidson is another relative success story 6 weeks in. All students were invited back with first years in doubles. Everyone was tested 2x week initially and now at least once a week. They’ve been at zero cases for over a week. The dining hall is open with a mix of indoor and outdoor seating w the full menu now available. My first year says the weather has been spectacular with many students spending a lot of time outdoors. The Lake campus on Lake Norman was reopened to students a few weeks back. Kids complained about the lack of access to workout facilities so the college set up a tent with exercise equipment. Academic buildings including the library and science center are open and there are plenty of study spaces available. There is strong peer pressure to behave (and respect for the Honor Code). Students are complying with the masking and, for the most part, social distancing restrictions. The college has begun to relax some restrictions.

However, Davidson leadership is taking nothing for granted. Their President was quoted in a recent Politico story Campus life sans Covid: A few colleges write the playbook for success:

“It could go wrong,” said Carol Quillen, president of Davidson College, a small liberal arts school that hosts the College Crisis Initiative’s review of campus coronavirus plans and requires at least once-weekly testing of the nearly 1,800 students living on or near campus.

“I don’t take anything for granted,” she said of a virus management plan expected to cost the North Carolina college nearly $10 million this year. “We think we have a system that will let us contain outbreaks, but we are really humble about it and ready to make changes if we need to.”

16989

Here’s a piece about Cornell, who also managed to have students return successfully: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/30/cornell-coronavirus-college-campuses-students/

16990

So the country’s already most privileged adult students get even more funding to get a Disneyland like experience while many of our low socio economic K-12s have been left wanting basic education for 6 months because their patients can’t afford internet access and their schools don’t have the funding to reduce class sizes enough to get them in person classes safely.

Have I got that correct? I want to vomit just typing that.

16991

You’re not wrong, which is why I’ve always thought the h.s. and college posts should have their own threads.

16992

Welcome other success stories! They are out there.

16993

Wake Forest is doing relatively well with Covid-19 so far. Positive cases have trended down sharply. The school just finished five weeks of random testing, 13/2105 tests positive, with 0.0% positive the last two weeks. The school appears to adjust the number of weekly random tests based on positivity trends.

NC has been relatively slow to reopen and meeting sizes are capped, so off campus temptations are scarce. Cold weather, flu season, and further NC reopening will present challenges, so we’re interested to see how the school community adapts.

WFU has some advantages in that campus access is restricted and is also located in a suburban location with no adjacent bars, music venues, etc. The preponderence of single occupancy and lack of Greek housing also helps.

DS24 and DD21 both having a good semester given the constraints. Both have “family” groups they hang out with on a social basis. They have a mixure of online, blended and in-person classes (DD21 only). They are in single rooms on and off campus. DS participates in campus activities, goes hiking or fishing in the mountains on weekends with friends. DD is busy outside of studies with her campus organizations and interviews for jobs via Zoom. Remote learning has its challenges, they say, but they are adapting. DS had office hours with a prof last week on Zoom, said it went well. Both spend a lot of time in their rooms studying, DS is also in the school library often.

They are so happy to be in school, even if there is a new normal.

16994

Well said @ProfSD Thanks for posting!

16995

The decision to do in person vs remote classes hinges on many factors. Big one is if the colleges give any prof the option to opt out, or do they place restrictions on who is eligible to opt out of in person teaching. Physical space is another. Some schools may have more larger size classrooms or better air filtration or the ability to upgrade filtration or open windows etc. And then class size plays a part. D’s school said that any class with over 30 kids (or maybe it’s 35) has to be remote. Other schools make different determinations. @homerdog - seems like Bowdoin was more cautious than most with the in person class determination perhaps because of the above considerations. Hamilton seems more open to in person classes, again perhaps because of the above conversations. As for indoor dining, I do think many schools were skittish of combining an indoor activity with unmasked participants, but another consideration could be space. Setting up grab n go with distancing can take up more space depending on the configuration of the dining hall and that can limit the seating.

16996

Agree. Though the inequities were there long before Covid hit. They are simply manifesting in new ways since the pandemic. I will also add, some people are now just tuning in. For those of us who were paying attention, economic hierarchies and systemic/institutionalized racism are nothing new. It’s just now that all communities have had to make some sort of adjustment in their educational model, people are (slightly) waking up.

16997

“Also a very good infographic here, shows 46% of students live on-campus, among other measures: https://postsecondary.gatesfoundation.org/what-were-learning/todays-college-students/”

The numbers from the Gates foundation look a little off, they say 46% live on campus, 9% at home and 45% in other housing, assuming that’s off campus. Most other reports have on-campus around 20%, at home at 30% and off campus at 50%.

See https://robertkelchen.com/2018/05/28/a-look-at-college-students-living-arrangements/

Anyway, fall 2019 has 18M college students, there are about 5.6M c/c students, 8M in public colleges and of those about 60% live off campus, there are 3.8M in private colleges, even if you assume most of those live on campus, the percent of on-campus is 30-33%. No way that on-campus can be the most popular housing option. (various sources)

16998

I thought this was kind of interesting: UC-San Diego was expecting 7,500 students to move into campus housing for the fall quarter, but 1,800 were no-shows. Canceling housing at the last minute I would expect – my son canceled his UC-Davis housing about a week before move-in, 2 weeks before classes began – but just not showing up does surprise me a bit. Not sure if these students are thinking they can just see how things go, and then move in later? Pre-pandemic, there were no doubt a small number of students every year who missed their move-in date for whatever reason, but I’m not sure how the university will handle logistically large numbers wanting to move in mid-quarter, particularly with virus precautions.

Unlike San Diego State, UCSD tested all on-campus students upon arrival (only 10 positives), and will conduct surveillance testing of individuals as well as wastewater testing. One of the things we learned from prior news articles is that the reason San Diego State did not have mandatory testing (until 2 weeks ago) was because they were still awaiting approval for that from the Cal State system! The outbreak at San Diego State is slowing, and now stands at over 1,000 positive students since the semester began in late August, the most of any private or public college/university in California. The county health department has linked at least 7 positive cases of non-SDSU community members to the SDSU outbreak, and the outbreak almost caused the county to fall into the state’s most restrictive tier, which would have required businesses like restaurants to cease indoor operations. Hopefully, UCSD can do better.

On the K-12 front, the reality is sinking in that large public high schools, while technically allowed to reopen under the state’s tier system, in reality have essentially no path to reopening under state guidelines for physical distancing and cohorts. One superintendent was being berated by some of his board members for not having a reopening plan, and his response was basically, “OK, tell me which state guidelines you want me to ignore, and I can come up with a plan, because you know as well as I do that we can’t reopen if we follow all the guidelines.” Elementary schools, both public and private, and smaller middle and high schools, mostly private, are reopening; too soon to say how it’s going.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2020-09-30/uc-san-diego-students-covid-19-tests

16999

It might be mostly good info (wrong about on-campus living though) but sorry, that graphic is not a good infographic… A pie chart where the slices add up to 1000% and where each slice is a bar chart is not a good chart. Just put the information in a table!

Even if you just consider four year colleges, still it’s not true that 46% of students live on campus.

17000

Sometimes the differences are in the definition on and off campus housing. For example, some schools can control much of the off-campus housing options, handling registration, and directly billing the rent charges. Some sources AFAIK count that as on-campus housing.

17001

What @ProfSD said regarding Hamilton. My son is a junior there, and although he’s missing the frat parties, he’s very happy to be on campus. He also has 3 out of his 4 classes F2F. The rowing team is practicing (not on the water). Even if COVID weren’t a thing, I don’t this he’d have much time for parties this year, anyway. His two econ classes are kicking his butt, his history and anthropology classes require a tremendous amount of reading and writing, and he’s applying like crazy for internships for next summer. He’s in a quad, by the way.