I’m sorry, but what part of your friend’s experience reminded you of mental health issues?
Be direct, what are you trying to say here?
May i take a stab?
I think that the overprivileged are using mental health issues as an excuse to use their political capital to muscle more resources to get their wants served, not their needs.
This country has chosen to allocate its testing capacity to residential colleges full of predominantly upper middle class young adults. Meanwhile many of our elderly are dying from being diagnosed too late. Low wage earning front line workers driving our buses, packing our groceries and caring in our hospitals are just at the viruses mercy. K-12 kids have been receiving a subpar education for 7 months because their schools don’t have the funding to put in the correct testing, class size snd ppe protocols in place. High density housing full of our poorest citizens are kindling.
I don’t think “this country” has decided to allocate testing to residential colleges. The colleges are businesses and each found a way to get testing for their students. They weren’t trying to keep testing from anyone else. Just taking care of their own (including the students but also the faculty and staff who work there.)
I agree. You can’t blame the private sector for a rudderless public sector. Register and vote.
Harvard is in the private sector and they acted the greater public good by going 100% online. As time goes on, the societal value of that decision has become more apparent to me. Around the world “ local lockdowns” are occurring mainly in college towns. A news report from Liverpool, England interviewed two old ladies who have breakfast together regularly at a Cafe, their only regular human contact, and that opportunity could soon go if local infection rates doesn’t improve.
A just society requires everyone to think of those less fortunate that themselves and not take more than they need.
“ community service’ isn’t just for Résumé padding.
In fact the Broad Institute in addition to conducting the most effective and robust testing at private colleges has been the lab that the state of MA contracted to reduce the spread in the homeless population during the surge, and also in rest homes. And the Broad institute was the lab contracted with to handle testing for the “Stop The Spread” campaign in MA by the Department of Public Health for red zone communities offering free covid testing with rapid turn around time results. Red zone communities are at highest risk for covid transmission, largely urban and reflective of high presentation of essential workers, intergenerational and non english speakers. It is simply not accurate the make sweeping generalizations like “this country has chosen to”…Thank you to the Broad Institute for your commitment to communities at risk in addition to testing at private colleges.
Harvard is not 100% online, freshmen are on campus.
I agree with @circuitrider that private colleges were left to figure things out on their own and had to balance a lot of difficult choices. Going 100% online has its own costs, and not just the mental health of kids that you lump together as overprivileged. What about all the staff who get furloughed and ripple effects on the surrounding community businesses? Cambridge, MA is probably a lot better able to weather the economic repercussions from Harvard going online than is the small town in Michigan where my kid’s college is located.
I submit that the public health community has learned a lot from the various approaches taken by colleges nationwide, data we wouldn’t have if everyone had gone 100% online. For example, from what I have read, it looks like transmission is mostly not happening in the classroom. And it looks like comprehensive approaches involving testing, masks and distancing can keep rates down, especially if the local community is complying with those efforts as well.
It seems strange to point to ultra-wealthy Harvard as the lodestar of model Covid policy, while at the same time suggesting that other schools are catering to the overly privileged. My kid’s school has a tiny endowment and it turns out lots of nurses and teachers. The school has also made it almost 9 weeks into the semester with a 1.5% positive rate since the start of the semester.
Winter is coming and that is going to force everyone to spend more time inside, obviously. The school has just converted some of its conference space into indoor dining seating so that tables and chairs can be spaced out for safer distancing. There’s a lot of creative problem solving going on at those colleges that have people on campus, and I’m sure they’re all sharing best practices.
We established a while back that testing on college campuses was a sensitive subject. Sleeping dog best not kicked seems to me.
Not to argue or critique (I’ve not read much of the recent discussion), but the 1.5% positive rate may mean different things depending on how often everyone is tested.
If everyone only gets tested once, that means “only” 15 infections per 1,000 people (but many may have been missed). But if everyone was tested ten times over the past month, that’s 15 infections per 100 people.
So discussing positivity rates without mentioning testing frequency is not very meaningful.
For comparison, MIT’s positive rate is 0.04%, and they test everyone twice a week.
But all classes are remote even for kids on campus so they are not going to class.
@TheVulcan Fair point about the importance of the frequency of testing. Mainly I was pushing back against the suggestion by others that schools that have students on campus are somehow catering to the overprivileged. As a parent of a kid at a small school in a small town with a small endowment, that struck me as an inappropriate criticism.
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Corinthian, I pretty much totally agree with your points. But I will point out that actually the merchants and their employees in Harvard Square are suffering terribly with missing 75% of the student body, with many small restaurants and shops looking at closure. There is a tremendous cost to communities missing their students (which I think was your point, but I’d just add that it is also true of Cambridge). Going all remote I do not think is the right answer for not only the students, but the surrounding communities, businesses, and school employees, etc. Employing other controls (masks, testing, distancing, etc as you point out) to prevent outbreaks is working on many campuses.
I think you are correct also that we are learning SO MUCH from the various college experiments.
Not sure how impressive that is given the low number of students on campus. The best examples are schools with everyone back who are still maintaining those rates (or lower) while testing everyone 2X/week.
Re UVA and other schools’ option of getting a grade or a pass/fail during Covid, and how that’s meant to reduce stress. My kid is pre-med and was interested in P/F last Spring, but she didn’t take advantage of that option because she was told that if you have a CHOICE, and you choose not to take a class for a grade, that won’t look so great on your med school application. I wonder how many pre-law kids and other kids going into competitive fields were told the same thing. So the kids under the most stress related to GPA were the very kids who couldn’t avail themselves of this option.
@melvin123 – Harvard Med caused that problem when they announced exactly as you described. This policy, among other factors such as access & equity, seemed to influence Yale to switch to all P/F last spring.
I was simply demonstrating that two schools can have similar number of total cases (52 at MIT since August) - yet wildly different positive rates if their testing frequencies differ significantly.
As for your point, I am guessing the schools you are referring to are mostly SLACs. Their total student body is typically smaller than just the senior year currently on MIT campus - and that’s before you account for graduate students and some additional individually permitted underclassmen.
…And then there’s our state flagship, that invited all students back and already saw 10% of them infected.
While I agree with your point it is not as easy as public vs private. There are a large number of private that IMO were unsuccessful this fall for various reasons. On the other hand, I am so far very happy with two of the three state schools I am dealing with and others on this board have pointed out other large state success stories. I do not see success measured by the number of cases or how much they test rather how the virus is being controlled and outbreaks are being handled. There are some parents that are not going to be happy unless there is weekly testing, zero cases, and the students that leave campus are suspended. I am more interested in how positive cases are handled and what measures were put in place from the beginning to slow the spread of any outbreak. (ie single dorms and online option of classes if not feeling well). I do not see the recent grading announcements from UVA as a bad thing it is simply them dealing with the current situation and trying to make the experience as positive as possible.
My D has been getting video updates the last few months from her hometown friends who went back to their respective campuses. Based on the videos, it looks like these kids have traveled back in time.
I saw the dad of one of my D’s friends last night. He told me that off campus parties are happening all the time and that his D is having a great time even though all of her classes are remote.
If I had a high school child, I would be encouraging her to apply to these schools, sure beats being remote stuck in one’s bedroom.