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A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall
- cracker_jacks 6y agoMany college towns and rental properties relying on student income will be devastated.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoPermanently, too, if this causes a paradigm shift and virtual learning becomes the norm. Beyond the crisis, colleges were already planning on declining enrollment due to demographic shifts. Real estate in exclusively college towns, dependent on collegiate rentals, will be seeing long term changes regardless.
- derrick_jensen 6y agoI don't believe virtual learning will be widely used long-term. I might be biased, coming from a mostly engineering school, but there is a lot of vital lab equipment needed for the curriculum, not to mention that social networking and connections are essential to most careers going forward, and I don't see that transferring over in the same way
- malandrew 6y agoI’d be happy if this was the beginning of the end for humanities departments that have become overtly political. More resources should be shifted to more utilitarian degrees like engineering and hard sciences.
- nradov 6y agoEngineers are worthless if they can't communicate effectively and don't understand the context of their work.
- baggy_trough 6y agoHumanities departments emit some of the most cryptic texts around. They should be worrying about that before trying to help engineers.
- klodolph 6y agoTu quouque doesn’t make an argument. Gutting humanities in favor of “practical” degrees is short-sighted in the extreme. The problem with humanities is not that it doesn’t provide value to the community, the problem is that it is difficult to monetize skills in the humanities. There is a pathology that larger organizations often develop where they start investing only in ideas that where they can measure the impact on the time scale of a performance review cycle. For example, any project where the results can’t be measured in one or two quarters might be dead on arrival, depending on what company you work for. The same kind of short-term, narrow-minded thinking is what makes people dismiss humanities.
- imtringued 6y agoOr there is an oversupply of humanities graduates and that is what is causing monetization problems. Just think about how many poorly paid artists there are.
- mattkrause 6y agoYou're gonna be gutted when you look up how much non-CS scientists make.
- saagarjha 6y agoPerhaps if you took the time to learn the humanities, they’d become more accessible to you? It’s not like engineering texts are the paragon of clarity.
- noema 6y agoThe opacity of contemporary humanities texts is overstated. Yes, the general academic style tends to be verbose and baroque. But it bespeaks a certain hubris when a layman to a given field claims an absence of meaning to its work. The topics being discussed are often technical and by virtue of their intended audience (peer scholars) presuppose vast amounts of preliminary knowledge.
- cassiet 6y agoWhat a useless world that would create.
- prawn 6y agoThere was a great tweet/meme about people savaging the idea of bailing out the arts industry during a pandemic, all while spending more and more time reading news sites, playing games and watching TV/movies online...
- twomoretime 6y agoYou can pick up most of the soft skills you learn in humanities by doing things like reading and practicing writing. The minimum functional skill level is low enough for a majority of people to achieve through practice with minimal guidance. People don't have to spend thousands of dollars and four years of their life to paint or sculpt or whatever - it may not be proficient and lifelike but it'll still be art. Your world wouldn't be all that much more drab if we stopped forcing engineers to learn "culture".
- eusebius 6y ago> People don't have to spend thousands of dollars and four years of their life to paint or sculpt or whatever - it may not be proficient and lifelike but it'll still be art. I don't think it's important to the overall argument of your comment, but this is incredibly reductive. If one has little appreciation for a particular form of art maybe this is true, but if, for example, all orchestras or other classical music ensembles were comprised of less proficient musicians I'd sooner stop listening to classical music altogether. > Your world wouldn't be all that much more drab if we stopped forcing engineers to learn "culture". I'm not sure if it was your intention, but quoting the word culture comes off as disparaging, but given the tone of your comment it certainly seems so. I think I would've agreed with you if you'd simply said "engineers shouldn't be forced to take humanities in higher education; doing so is largely ineffective, at least in terms of imparting cultural appreciation and other related soft skills." Instead, I can't help but read it and think that it's single-minded and tone-deaf.
- cassiet 6y ago
- bransonf 6y agoI once thought like this too. And then I studied engineering to learn that I hated it. I ended up switching into the humanities. Once there, I began to apply a combination of statistics and computer science to address very real problems (crime, vacancy, civic participation, neighborhood economics etc.) We don’t actually live in a world governed only by the hard sciences. There are people here too, and I’d argue that understanding people is just as difficult as understanding the laws of physics. Some of the biggest challenges in society today are not questions of hard science, but rather about people and groups and institutions. I think our current situation exemplifies this.
- malandrew 6y agoI didn't criticize humanities in general. I criticized humanities departments that have become overtly political. The overtly political ones produce useless graduates.
- noema 6y agoMore resources ARE being shifted to those "practical" (read: revenue-generating) programs, to the detriment of students. The purpose of higher education is edification, not securing directly applicable job skills - that's what trade schools are for. Being able to read, write, interpret and communicate well are just as important to a software developer than the textbook CS curriculum. It's only because of the harsh economic reality of America's university system that such a prospect is even thinkable.
- JCharante 6y agoAdding on to this, college is a great place to meet students from all around the world. The downside of virtual learning is that many students fled the countries where the government's response was underwhelming, so it's hard to collaborate across so many timezones. If virtual learning continues to be the norm, then students would likely go to schools to operate in a timezone that works best for them (which would most likely be during the day for them). This would eliminate the opportunity to work on projects with people from the other side of the world for most.
- anjc 6y agoIn my experience, the primary limit for engineering/CS labs are simply room capacities and the number of PCs per lab. Each lab therefore must be tightly scheduled by the school. Virtual learning has been amazing in this sense: labs can be rescheduled, have unlimited capacities, can run concurrently, etc. They're also far easier to manage, less noisy, you aren't on your feet for hours.
- klodolph 6y agoForgive me, but I find it a bit hard to be sympathetic in a broad sense to the organizations that make their money from rental income.
- jacoblambda 6y agoAs someone who has made an effort to build a connection with my landlords, being a landlord is not in any way an easy job. Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. This is doubly so in a rural university town where the seasonally renting(2/3rds of the year) population is anywhere from 10 to 30 times the size of the permanent residents in the surrounding area. Also more generally, the lack of university students in these rural university towns could potentially cripple the local economy for a long time. Many of the local businesses are only able to sustain themselves with the income they receive during the Fall and Spring semesters.
- clumsysmurf 6y ago> Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. Good landlords are hard to find. There is so much information asymmetry when choosing a rental property. They can get large troves of data on you, but the reverse is not so easy if possible at all.
- q084yn39cptyth 6y agoBusiness opportunity in that current asymmetry?
- klodolph 6y agoBeing a good landlord is not an easy job, but individual landlords (good or bad) are in the minority. The majority of properties are owned by PMCs, and the difference is larger when you look at MDUs or college towns. By their nature, PMCs are after profit, and improvements are an expense to minimize. The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC. Why bother to replace moldy carpet, if the tenants don’t stick around to take you to court for it? Having rented from PMCs in the past, having worked in college housing, the idea that you would feel sympathy towards a PMC in a college town is pathological.
- aiddun 6y agoCurrent college student here at a school with a large off-campus housing population - one thing I've been hearing from some of my friends (although anecdotal) is a decent amount of people still want to go to their apartments next semester even if it's online. I don't know how much of a dent this behavior will do overall, especially because I think an overwhelming majority of people would prefer not to have to pay rent every month for an unnecessary apartment.
- code4tee 6y agotl;dr: Basically everyone will decide this summer.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoThey'll decide again when they have an outbreak in a dorm or when a few faculty members die. It's hard to imagine that presence instruction will be back in the fall.
- rjtobin 6y agoI’m a little surprised by this sentiment (maybe I’m naively optimistic). I’m curious, do you (and others) think elementary and high schools will be back next fall?
- throwawayoverhe 6y agoK12 is a lot easier because it's not residential.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoI doubt that school will be back in session. Coronavirus infection in children and adolescents is generally mild, but that does not mean that they are not infectious and can't pass the disease to their parents. That will have impact, 20 % of adults will become severely ill with fever for weeks. It will hit hospitals and workplaces.
- x0x0 6y agoI suspect there will be a lot of pressure from parents to reinstitute in-person schooling so they have daycare. I suspect we'll also see our first couple of disease clusters and super spreaders with associated deaths clearly attributable to a child in school. (I hope to god we'll have some compassion and keep the kids' names out of this, but I doubt it.) Once that hits the news, I suspect lots of parents will refuse to put their kids in school. In CA, for example, this may have devastating effects on the school district: they get money on an asses-in-seats basis [1]. I suspect that home schooling is about to have an enormous boom. [1] https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/how-do-you-say-here-in-a-virtual-classroom/ https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/how-do-you-...
- downerending 6y agoI feel bad for the colleges. But anyone in their right mind that's going to college to learn things will take a gap year. Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!
- jacoblambda 6y agoIf you are relying on scholarships to afford university, this is not an option. If you break full time status you essentially forfeit all of your scholarships and it is very unlikely you will get them back.
- saagarjha 6y agoDepends on the scholarship, but very few will pay during the gap year.
- kathe-rine 6y agoPerhaps this varies, but I was able to pause all my scholarships to take a year off from uni.
- logarhythmic 6y agoThe issue is that it's not possible for the vast majority of students to just "pause" their lives and wait until this all blows over
- baggy_trough 6y agoHard to imagine packing up and moving across the country into a dorm, taking the risk of being kicked out a few weeks later.
- standardUser 6y agoHarder still to imagine being 18 and deciding to play it safe and stay with mom and dad for god-knows how many more months. I'd take the risk if I was able.
- nprz 6y agoCFR for those aged 60 or greater is at 6.4%[0]. And of course an even larger percentage will end up hospitalized. How many professors are in that high risk demographic? Class is just supposed to go on while professors inevitably fall ill, become hospitalized and die? [0]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
- arbitrary_name 6y agoProbably the only way for young bloods to get tenure. Kidding.
- dba7dba 6y agoI would think many professors will ask for remote teaching option even if campuses reopen? With office hours held outdoors? I am a product of University of California system and many of my lower level classes had hundreds or students. I barely got to see the professor up close so maybe this remote video teaching may even been a better option. :)
- q084yn39cptyth 6y agoMy guess is there will be mandatory testing for students wanting to return, along with heavy disease surveillance. I also suspect even places claiming "normal operation" will not actually be normal — certain things will be virtual and other things not. There will likely be some reshuffling of teaching assignments too. I noticed also (former professor) that my institution is now heavily incentivizing early retirement for those getting close to qualifying, and are not shy about linking it to coronavirus. Finally, I think a lot of social distancing guidelines apply technically in many situations with lectures, etc. It will be an interesting semester.
- tsumnia 6y agoThe List, because wall: Beloit College Boston University Brown University California Baptist University California State University at Fullerton Chapman University Centre College Christopher Newport University Claremont Colleges Clemson University Cornell University Drury University East Tennessee State University Emory University George Mason University George Washington University Harvard University Haverford College Iowa Board of Regents Iowa, and the University of Northern Iowa Macalester College Marquette University Merrimack College Montana State University North Carolina State University North Dakota State University Oakland University Ohio State University Purdue University San Jose State University Shenandoah University Southern New Hampshire University Stanford University Trine University University of Arizona University of Arkansas at Fayetteville University of Colorado at Boulder University of Connecticut University of Central Florida University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of Maine system University of Mary Washington University of Maryland system University of Michigan University of Missouri University of Nebraska University of Oklahoma University of Oregon University of Portland University of Pittsburgh University of South Carolina University of Tennessee at Knoxville University of Texas at Austin University of Virginia Utah System of Higher Education Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Tech University Wake Forest University Washington State University Wayne State University West Virginia University William Jewell College Williams College Yale University
- rjtobin 6y agoThe list by itself is of limited use, since each college on the list has made different announcements. I’d say the summary is most have vaguely worded statements leaving open the possibility of either remote learning, in-person learning or some combination of the two.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoSorry if I'm missing something, but is that the list of colleges that will be onsite in the fall?
- downerending 6y agoYes.
- zingar 6y agoI work for a student lender (for postgrad degrees only), we're scrambling to handle all the classes that are being postponed, or telling their students not to fly and they'll start online (since we lend to international students, the date they are in country matters a lot).
- alec_kendall 6y agoI moved back home after my university moved my classes to online (mid-march). I’m now paying rent on an apartment I don’t need and have a lease for next school year that I might not use. Even if in-person classes start again, I’ll have to worry about being screwed again next spring. The only other option I could think of was subleasing but unfortunately I signed my lease in January.
- Alkhwarizmi 6y agoSame issue but I’ve considered contacting the landlord to renegotiate lease terms or take it to civil court if they refuse to help us during these extra unusual circumstances.
- zomglings 6y agoCan you break the lease? Better to lose a month or two of rent than >= 6 months of rent.
- alexbanks 6y agoUsually breaking a lease is 1.5-2.5x a month's rent. This will definitely be cheaper than paying for an apartment you won't use, even though it sucks.
- klodolph 6y agoThis depends on the jurisdiction and the terms of the lease. Most places in the US, there are very few ways to break a lease without a clause in the contract allowing it. For example, in New York, if you break a lease the landlord is obligated to make a “reasonable effort” to re-rent the apartment. You are still on the hook in the interim. In the current environment, the apartment probably won’t be re-rented.
- alexbanks 6y agoSaying anything other than "It depends on the lease" isn't really valuable, so that's what I'll respond with. It depends on the lease.
- skwb 6y agoI highly suspect that many large public universities will make large lectures online and cap in person enrollment for discussion/seminar/lab. You can probably easily ramp up hiring for these since they're mostly grad students, and frankly grad students are cheap (I say this as one).
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- throwawayoverhe 6y agoSTEM grad students are surprisingly expensive given how poorly they're paid and how valuable their work is (I say this as a former grad student, but also as someone who budgets for them). Universities will now have to cull "overhead". Grad students and professors will have a golden opportunity about 1-2 years from now to capture a less tiny fraction of the wealth they create. Don't let it go to waste.
- dba7dba 6y agoIt is just my personal opinion but if I was in a position to plan for the upcoming academic year in US, I'd recommend below. - Start Fall semester with onsite classes. - For those who wish to participate remotely for medical reasons or personal preference, they should be allowed to teach/learn remotely. - But everyone (administration, profs, students, support staff, local town/city) should be prepared to have the teaching go virtual with the campus shutting down on a short notice. - If Covid-19 reappears locally or surges again nationally, campus should close down. I say at least start the upcoming semester in Fall 2020 with onsite classes, for the sake of human bonds to form between the students/professors. It may sound too unpredictable but I think having even one or two months of in person interaction would be beneficial for the incoming freshman class. Also, dorm/parking/housing cost probably should be charged in monthly increments, not per semester, to prepare for possible shutdown of campus in the middle of a semester.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoIt was announced today that experts are already doubting the possibility of hosting the Tokyo Olympics even in the summer of 2021, because a vaccine may not be available or widely applied then. I suspect we are going to see a new wave of cancellations of things we initially thought might resume by the end of 2020 or mid-2021. I don’t know if this will affect enrollment of local students who wouldn't have to travel to campus, but the conference side of academia may be disrupted, i.e. everything which was scheduled for 2020 and was recently postponed to 2021, may not happen even then. Expect a lot of complaining from academics about this being a lost two years (at least) for them in terms of in-person networking and career advancement.
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- collegeburner 6y agoHigh schooler here. On-line school is far from perfect. There are two approaches I've seen: 1. The "self-taught" style. This one is being done by my linear algebra class: the prof tells us which chapters to read, sends out notes, and some recommended problems. Periodically, he sends out a take-home test; we work it and send him the answers. This style is helped by the fact that our book is short and concise enough to teach but still be readable. No one wants to read if a chapter takes hours. This approach works great for me, but it requires a more self-directed student to function. 2. The "micro-manager" style. This one is being done by my physics class: the prof uses online, checked homework, multiple zoom calls, requires us to record videos of ourselves solving problems in a "tutorial style", gives on-line quizzes, and attempts to give the same tests on-line as were given in-person. This results in horrible, invasive solutions that give a "proctor" remote access to one's computer, require one to use a webcam to be monitored, and require one to show the space around him using a mirror. This style is awful, wastes colossal amounts of time, but is the option on which teachers fall back when they lack confidence in their students to be self-directed. Most teachers are going for option 2, which is worse than in-person learning. This may sound cynical, but mot of the tools for "active learning" or "on-line engagement" make students' lives harder, waste their time, and offer no benefit beyond an administrator feeling as though he's "done something". Edit: can any current student tell me if y'all are getting refunded for room and board, at least partially? Y'all paid for something and are being prohibited from using it, so that seems reasonable.
- bachmeier 6y ago> can any current student tell me if y'all are getting refunded for room and board, at least partially To my knowledge, all colleges/universities are refunding room and board for the times campus is closed. Legally I don't think there's an option. Online teaching is difficult. It's not a good substitute for all parts of the in-person experience.
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