Last week, Ayiana Davis Polen finally set foot on the campus of Spelman College – a historically black liberal arts school for women in Atlanta. She’s a freshman there, but she started her college experience last fall, taking classes in her room in Puerto Rico.
Back then, she wasn’t sure if it looked like college – but then again, she had nothing to compare.
Now, she is about to. Spelman, like many colleges in the United States, is stepping up his personal offerings for the spring semester. For Davis Polen, that meant there was a place for her in a dorm on the picturesque campus.
“It’s very good,” she said Friday, as she settled into her single room. “I definitely feel the difference, because there are new people around me. Obviously, there will be certain restrictions, but I think I will start to get an idea of the college.”
More than a quarter of colleges are offering face-to-face components this spring, according to new data from the College Crisis Initiative, or C2i, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Smaller institutions are more likely to be face-to-face, as are private four-year colleges. Public universities and community colleges are much more likely to be online. The data shows that about 40% of colleges are mainly online in the spring, although about 25% of schools in the data set are listed as “indeterminate”.
“There is a tendency to be more in person, but most of the changes we are seeing are on the margins,” explains Christopher Marsicano, who leads the C2i team and is an assistant professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, where C2i is Headquartered. “We are not seeing many institutions move from being completely online to being fully in-person.”
Instead, he says, colleges are maintaining some remote classes, but are trying to have more face-to-face offers. “Because this is what the students want and that is where the demand is.”
Delaying the start
About 200 colleges have delayed the start of face-to-face classes, according to the new data. In North Carolina, several universities, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Appalachian State University, started the semester online, with plans to start face-to-face classes several weeks later. Both universities cite high levels of the spread of coronavirus in their communities for this delay.
“Delays are a fantastic tool for trying to keep students safe,” says Marsicano. “We know that students who come to campus spread COVID-19. We also know that COVID-19 numbers are the worst they have been in a long time.”
And despite the best attempts to keep a bubble on a campus, research suggests that colleges are not isolated. In the fall, through genomic sequencing, Paraic Kenny and Craig Richmond discovered links between the coronavirus that infected university students in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and patients in nearby nursing homes.
“If you have a lot of cases on the college campus, transferring to nursing homes can happen and can happen very, very quickly,” said Kenny, a cancer biologist and director of the Kabara Cancer Research Institute. At the end of last year, 33 deaths at the La Crosse nursing home were found to be related to the same strain of the virus that was circulating on local university campuses at the beginning of the semester.
It is extremely difficult to separate campus life from the wider community, Kenny says: “There are many bars in the center, and students go to bars. Students need to eat, then they go to the supermarket. Students have lungs, so students breathe. If you have a lung, you can get the coronavirus. And if you have a lung, you can get the coronavirus. “
Blockages and high case count
And, in fact, campuses have seen a large number of cases among students returning for the new semester.
The University of California, Berkeley, is seeing an “increase in confirmed cases of COVID-19 among students”. The College of Charleston in South Carolina announced concerns that “large, non-socially distant and unmasked meetings” contributed to the high levels of dissemination on campus. At the University of Richmond, Virginia, student feedback two weeks ago brought “a worrying increase” in positive cases. Much of this spread was happening among students who lived off campus, which meant that the university restricted students off campus to remote classes until February 8.
“Whenever the numbers of COVID-19 increase, any intervention that prevents student mobility, that prevents the student from going from point A to point B, will help to contain these cases”, explains Marsicano. Last fall, several colleges implemented blockages under which students could leave their homes or dormitories for just the essentials, like shopping or going to class. Research has shown that transmission is much less likely to happen in a masked and socially distant classroom than off-campus, in large meetings, or among students living together.
At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the local health department last week issued a two-week block for students in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19 on campus. Several other schools did the same. To the north, in East Lansing, Michigan State University has one in operation now. Union College, a small school in upstate New York, emerged this week from its two-week block after an increase in cases in early January.
“I’m nervous about doing it,” said Sophie Brown, a sophomore in art history at Union College. “I did not let my guard down, although COVID and this way of life seem to be the new norm.” She said she knows the risks: “I feel that this is where you face the most problems, because we are at a point in our lives where we want to leave – we want to go and meet new people and kind of be in college. But we also have to take a step back and look at the big picture. “
Looking forward
For many campuses, spring will look and feel like autumn, with mask rules, limits for larger gatherings, food options for travel and socially distant spaces. The frequency and prevalence of tests for coronavirus has improved dramatically, however, after research and case studies have demonstrated the importance of regularly testing the entire student body – including those who live off campus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which before the fall semester had not recommended that colleges test students on arrival, updated their guidelines to more clearly explain the benefits.
Another lesson learned last spring, when the virus started to spread: it is not a good idea to take spring break. Many schools have announced that there will be no spring break this year, based on research showing that leaving the campus to stay with friends and family and returning a week later has sparked several outbreaks in 2020.
Student views
While there is a demand for more face-to-face opportunities – and major challenges for virtual learning, including connectivity issues, Zoom fatigue and extra costs for devices – most students taking online classes want these options to continue, according to research research from non-profit Third Way and New America. These surveys also found that the pandemic undermined students’ confidence in their university leaders: Half of the university students in the survey agreed with the statement “my institution only cares about the money it can get from me”.
This number is higher among black and Latino students. But students still seem to believe that their faculties have safety and well-being in mind – 71% think “my institution has the best interest at heart” and also “my institution is concerned with my health and well-being”.
At Spelman College in Atlanta, leaders invited first-year students to apply to live on campus during the spring semester. To have a low density campus, they predicted to refuse some students. But only a fraction of the class applied. The number was low enough for the college to expand campus housing to the entire student body. Every student who wanted to be on campus had a place.
Ayiana Davis Polen, one of nearly 250 students on campus, says she is grateful. She says she is not nervous about catching the virus, saying she has friends who went back to other campuses in the fall and did not catch it.
“There are things I can do to avoid getting sick, so I’ll just be sure to take the appropriate measures,” she says. She has a thermometer and is taking her temperature twice a day – upon waking up and before going to bed. She will wear a mask when she leaves the dorm and avoid crowds.
The interesting twist for Davis Polen is that although she is now living on campus, all classes except one – piano – are online. “It is true that I will still be taking my classes from a desk in my room, but at least this semester I am in a dormitory. I am still excited.” She hopes that there will be opportunities for social interactions, such as study groups, so that she does not feel that she is studying alone.
