Dr. Sarah Van Orman steps carefully around the word “normal” when she describes what the fall of 2021 semester will look like at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and at other colleges across the country.
In the era of the covid, the word evokes images of life on campus that university administrators know will not exist again for a long time. As much as they want to move in that direction, Van Orman said, those first steps can be stopped.
“We believe that higher education in general will be able to resume a normal type of activity in the fall of 21, and by that I mean students in classrooms and housing estates, others on campus and things generally open,” said Van Orman, director of health at USC. “But it will not be like the fall of 2019, before the pandemic. This will take a while. “
Interviews with campus officials and health administrators across the country reveal similar thoughts. Almost all employees who spoke to KHN said that universities will open their classrooms and dormitories this fall. In many cases, they can no longer fail to do so. But controlling these environments and limiting viral spread is among the biggest challenges in the history of many schools – and the notion of what constitutes normality is again being adjusted in real time.
University officials predicted a significant increase in activity on campus, but with limits. Most schools expect to have students living on campus, but attending some classes in person or only on selected days – a way to scale the number of staff and limit classroom exposure. And everyone plans to have vaccines and many tests available.
“We are going to use facial coverings,” said Van Orman. “We are going to reduce the density of people in certain areas. We are going to offer vaccines on campus and we need tracking mechanisms so that we can carry out contact tracking when necessary. “
With three vaccines being administered across the country so far, the chances that faculty and faculty staff will be partially or fully vaccinated against greed by the fall are increasing. Students generally rank well on the priority list for receiving envious vaccines, so schools hope that vaccinating adults will keep envy rates too low to cause serious outbreaks on campus. It may take months to test this assumption, depending on vaccination and disease rates, the duration of immunity induced by the vaccine and the X factor of the variants and their resistance to existing vaccines.
And most colleges are interpreting federal law as a ban on requiring employees or students to be vaccinated, because the vaccines have only received emergency use authorization and have not yet been licensed by the Food and Drug Administration.
Despite everything, many schools are advancing. The University of Houston recently announced that it would return to pre-pandemic levels of activity on campus, just as the University of Minnesota did. Boston University President Robert Brown said students will return this fall to classrooms, studios and laboratories this fall “without the social disengagement protocols that have been in place since last September”. No hybrid classes will be offered, he said, nor will “workplace adjustments” be made for teachers and staff.
The University of South Carolina plans to return university residences to normal occupancy, with face-to-face classes and resumption of other operations on the main campus of 35,000 students, announced Debbie Beck, the school’s director of health last month.
In some of the largest state institutions, however, it is clear that a campus-by-campus decision-making process remains at stake. In December, the California State University system, a giant that enrolls nearly half a million students, announced plans for teaching “mostly in person” this fall, only to be challenged by employees on one of its 23 campuses.
The Chico State campus, which has 17,000 students, plans to offer about a quarter of its fall courses in full-face or combined, President Gayle Hutchinson wrote to the campus community in February. “There is no easy explanation of what this means for students,” she said. “It can mean programming entirely online or in person and online.”
The University of California’s 285,000 student system in January declared a return to instruction primarily in person for the fall, but said specific plans and protocols would be announced for each of its 10 campuses. Places like UCLA in Los Angeles County, which has been ravaged by high infection rates for months, could end up with far fewer face-to-face classes than UC campuses in Merced or Santa Cruz.
There is no way around the financial component of school decisions for the fall. After most of the more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. went into total or near total physical paralysis at the end of last spring, general enrollment dropped 2.5% and freshman enrollment decreased by more than 13%. And the real pain was felt in empty dormitories and cafeterias. For many schools, accommodation and food constitute the year’s profit margin.
According to a College Board survey, accommodation and food costs have risen faster than tuition and fees at two- and four-year public institutions in the past five years. In 2017, the Urban Institute found that accommodation and food costs have more than doubled since 1980 in inflation-adjusted dollars. When those dollars run out, as they did during the pandemic, budgets can be severely strained.
In mid-March, Mills College, a 169-year-old liberal arts school for women in Oakland, announced that it would no longer admit first-year undergraduate students and would instead become an institute that promotes female leadership. . Mills is among a series of schools in financial distress that the pandemic has pushed to its limit.
In an October letter to Congress seeking greater financial support, the American Education Council estimated a total of $ 120 billion in pandemic-related losses by colleges and universities in the country. The Chronicle of Higher Education in February revised that estimate to an impressive $ 183 billion, “the biggest losses our financial sector has ever faced”.
There are no easy solutions. The hybrid class model, with teachers simultaneously teaching some students in person and others online, “is a major survey for both institutions and faculty,” said Sue Lorenson, vice president of undergraduate at Georgetown University. But while instructors generally loathe it, this model will almost certainly be in place at most schools this fall to keep enrollment as high as possible.
Clearly, the preference at any school is to have these students back on campus. And university health officials prefer to see them living in dormitories. As long as infection rates are low in communities around the campus, “schools really have a great capacity to keep children in residential corridors very safe,” said Van Orman. “We have the ability to test them regularly and mitigate them with the use of a mask, distance, disinfection and other things.”
One of USC’s biggest viral outbreaks, in fact, occurred off campus last summer, when more than 40 people were infected in the “fraternity” area, a few blocks from the university.
On campuses across the country, officials say, autumn will again be marked by general adjustments. What about returning to the real normal?
“I don’t reasonably think that this will happen before September 22, and I really believe that we will probably be looking at 23,” Antonio Calcado, director of operations at Rutgers, New Jersey’s 70,000 student state university, said during a presentation at campus. “It was easy to paralyze the university. It will be difficult to bring him back to where we need to be. “