Maybe I’m wrong, but I do think colleges will open in the fall. We can’t have everything shut down forever. I see some restrictions start to be lifted in June with pretty much everything being open by August. I do think it will be longer than that for big gatherings like NFL games, but I don’t think the economy can stand being closed down into the fall. I do think people will continue to get sick and outbreaks will flare up but the doctors are getting better at treating it.
Another reason for my new found optimism is that, if we don’t have cases in July and early August, how can colleges say “stay home”? I’m not sure anyone will know what will happen come later in the fall. It would be hard for schools to tell kids to stay home when there’s no virus around with no looming threat. Schools will maybe continue precautions that work during the summer and then hope for the best.
I don’t think anyone is expecting “no virus around” by July or early August… and in fact, there IS the looming thread of it coming back in the late fall/winter.
@katliamom yes. Of course. But no one knows what it will be like in fall or winter and I don’t think colleges will stay off campus starting in August because they won’t know how/when the virus could return. What if they go online and then the virus doesn’t show up until early Jan? Then they lost all of that money. There has been talk at some schools about starting later. I didn’t really understand that but now I’m thinking that, if colleges want to keep kids on campus as much as possible, they could start a little later, not have a fall break, just break for the four days of Thanksgiving weekend, and then hope to get those two/three weeks of Dec in without too much of an outbreak. Maybe they end up having to send kids home for online after Thanksgiving but they know they can do that because they are doing it now.
There’s just too much disruption (gap years, leave of absences, parents’ pushback on full tuition for online) if they start the semester online. I’ve really made a big swing in my view of this today but it’s starting to make more sense to me that, barring the government saying they cannot resume class on campus, I think colleges will have no choice but to give it a go…albeit with whatever restrictions they think they might need to get as much of the semester in as possible.
Interesting. I think colleges will have no choice but NOT opening until 2021. The liability would be enormous.
College campuses have a lot of staff besides faculty and not everyone is young and fit with a perfectly clean bill of health. If students come back from areas that didn’t stop the spread they could be endangering not only the faculty and staff of the colleges but also those people’s families and the surrounding community. And they’d possibly be adding stress to the local healthcare system too. So I think the decision to open up will have to be decided on a state level, not a college level.
If students aren’t allowed back on campus or they take a gap semester or year, I think colleges will look very different when they do go back. I don’t see how colleges can avoid layoffs if that happens. I’d expect to see fewer lecturers, adjuncts, and visiting faculty. If there are fewer instructors then the number of courses each department offers can be reduced, and departments themselves can be combined with others. Programs that aren’t quite big enough to qualify as a department could be eliminated altogether. Positions of support staff could be eliminated and some positions could be merged (so fewer people to staff financial aid, the registrar’s office, housing office, etc). Clubs, sports, and college sponsored travel would probably face cuts too. I think there are going to be some tough choices ahead.
Dr. Facui was quite confident at yesterday’s press conference that schools could resume in the fall.
It is sounding to me like an antibody test is in our near future an that is going to present some solutions until a vaccine can be administered.
Colleges will go back for the same reason work will resume. Yes, there will be some additional cases, but at some point life must resume for all of us. Those at higher risk may isolate more, but the rest will need to get on with life. Fortunately the vast majority of cases in the young are very mild.
Not sure how the antibody test will help. So if you test negative you won’t be allowed back to work or on campus? Seems like a legal nightmare. Something the ACLU would jump on. Plus there’s on-going debate as to how easy/difficult it is to be reinfected. If it’s easier than thought then antibodies won’t help as much as hoped.
That’s the million dollar question. At what point does America say it’s time to get back to work? At some point people are going to say enough is enough and be willing to risk it.
I didn’t read the entire 9 pages (so someone may have already mentioned it) but I read an interesting comment somewhere yesterday about colleges discussing concerns of safety issues around opening dorms with communal style bathrooms.
Offices and restaurants have communal bathrooms too.
I wondered about public bathrooms in general. The discussion didn’t elaborate. I am guessing the issue might revolve around brushing teeth, flossing? Showering? No idea. FWIW, it was shared by someone who was part of a discussion amg a college’s personnel, not a personal commentary.
chmcnm I think we have to be patient. Dr. Fauci was quite confident that school can resume in the fall. I think when they are ready they will roll out the plan.
@Empireapple I’m patient and I’m sure they’ll roll out a plan. I hope you’re right and I’ll just leave it at that.
I agree with the comment that the antibody test won’t be useful for the purposes of opening campuses. While a very large number of people have contracted the virus, it is still a very small percentage of the population. If you require an antibody test to come back on campus, what will you do when only 5% of returning students test positive? Send the rest home? That won’t work. Not everyone lives in a hotspot. Are we supposed to purposely send our students out to catch it so they will have antibodies by the fall? That’s absurd.
We’re all speculating. None of us, including Dr. Fauci, knows what will happen in the fall at this moment, even though his educated guess is certainly as good as, if not better than, anyone else’s.
However, we’re likely to have some better data in the next few weeks to base our predictions on. Today is the first day many people of Wuhan, the original epicenter of the outbreak, are allowed to travel across China. By all account, the trains and planes leaving Wuhan are full (limited somewhat by social distancing rules so that planes are only allowed to be about 2/3 full). We’ll start to see if new cases develop elsewhere in China in the next few days and weeks. If no or few new cases result from all these travels, there’s a much better chance schools will reopen in the fall, assuming we can control the spread here before this summer (which I think we will if we all do our part by distancing socially and covering up our faces in crowded places).
I work in a k-12 school that is currently in a hotspot. The county is the biggest hotspot in the state.
I work from home and speak with the staff regularly. Knock on wood…nobody has been sick. What if we all have a negative antibody test? What does that mean? Do we close the school? Do we get tested for the virus every month? Do we assess everybody…including kids …who btw come in sick all the time…before they enter the building? What about the parents who give their kids Tylenol and send them in…because they are “fine”? We need a real system that works.
Students in the county (different district) just got word that schools will be closed “indefinitely.” What does that even mean? Will summer school be virtual?
While Dr. Fauci may have said schools will open in the fall, I don’t think he said schools throughout the entire country will open in the fall…? Also…he said we really won’t have normalcy until there is a vaccine. What does that mean for dorms? Dining halls? Sporting events?
I assume there will be some kind of plan…especially if we have a proven treatment by the fall. I also think a lot of these decisions may be left to the states. And…college life will be different until there is a vaccine.
Just my opinion…
@Laxmama24 , do you have an incoming freshman who has to live in off campus housing? Assuming that since he knows no one else, that this isn’t in your hometown?
I really feel for today’s high school seniors/incoming college freshmen. It is a big leap sending your first college freshman off, then add in all of the uncertainty of today’s world. I think if I was sending someone off, and they had to start off in an off campus apartment, I would spend this quarantine time on practical independent living skills such as laundry, basic home maintenance (fuse box, toilet plunging, toilet chain), cleaning, cooking. As someone who has sent two off to college without knowing anyone else there at first, I feel pretty confident in college orientation and socialization for incoming freshman. So its the off campus living stuff I would focus on.
me29034 I agree with the comment that the antibody test won’t be useful for the purposes of opening campuses.
Various reports suggest that some already have the antibodies without being exposed to CV. This is why some test positive to CV and don’t even know they have it. The princess cruise ship was tested (the entire ship) and 42% tested positive but were asymptomatic. It is believed that this number in the general population is much larger than first assumed. There is much discussion that people without the antibodies will be given them as protection until vaccine. Some of the discussion also centers around the confidence that treatment will be effective by fall. “It will be a different picture by then” is what we are hearing a lot.
There is much going on in this area that remains to be seen. Don’t shoot the messenger.