College officials say they have learned important lessons about managing the pandemic on their campuses. Not everyone is so confident.
It was a tough fall semester for many American colleges and universities, with declining enrollment, canceled classes and sporting events, widespread Zoom fatigue and enough coronavirus-infected students nationwide to fill three and a half Rose Bowls.
But many university officials say that lessons from the fall will allow them to do something many experts considered unthinkable a few months ago: bring even more students back onto campus in January and February, when classes resume for the spring.
The University of California, San Diego, for instance, is making room for more than 11,000 students in campus housing — about 1,000 more than it housed in the fall. The University of Florida is planning to offer more face-to-face classes than it did before the pandemic. And Princeton University, which let only a few hundred students live on campus last semester, has offered space to thousands of undergraduates.
The determination to bring back more students, even as the pandemic is surging in many states, partly reflects the financial imperative to have more students paying room and board, as well as the desire to provide something resembling a college experience.
But there is also an emerging confidence among at least some college administrators that they have learned much about managing the pandemic on their campuses. Test aggressively. Contact trace assiduously. Maintain mask rules and social distancing. And don’t underestimate students’ willingness to obey restrictions.
“What makes me optimistic is we had the virus in our community, and each time we did, we were able to stop transmissions dead,” said David Greene, president of Colby College in Maine, which brought its whole student body back in the fall using aggressive health measures, and plans to do the same again next semester.
Experts said a major test of whether colleges learned the right lessons would come in January and February, when students travel back to school from home.
“The disease is a lot more widespread now than it was” in the fall, said Dr. Tom Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama Administration and is now president of a global health initiative to prevent heart disease and epidemics. “When people travel, the virus travels.”
Since the start of the pandemic, campuses have weighed the financial and social benefits of business as usual against the terrifying risk of Covid-19. Young people are statistically less likely than older adults to become severely ill or die from the infection, but they have turned college towns into Covid-19 hot spots.Schools and the communities around them have also enforced public health rules inconsistently.
Many institutions are choosing not to bring back more students, planning instead to hunker down over the winter as infections mount and the nation awaits a vaccine. The University of Michigan, which spent a rocky fall trying to keep thousands of students on campus, has told most of its students to stay home and study remotely next semester. The California State University’s 23 campuses have concluded that sticking with remote classes is the safest approach for the spring.
But other schools, and some experts, are asking: Safe compared with what?
“Having students return to campus to live under the imperfect supervision of college administrators is risky,” said A. David Paltiel, a professor of health policy and management at the Yale School of Public Health. “But having students stay home to live under the imperfect supervision of their parents and families is also risky.”
That argument has been particularly compelling for schools that managed the fall with relatively minimal infections, and the schools that watched and learned from them. Cornell University expects about 19,500 students will be living on or around its Ithaca, N.Y., campus next semester, more than 80 percent of enrollment and about 1,500 more students than were there during the fall.
Brown will roughly triple, and Harvard will about double, the number of students in campus housing in the new year. Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., will add about 100 students to the approximately 1,200 who were living on campus in the fall. It also plans to re-establish its study abroad programs, according to a school spokesman.
Students have also proved more conscientious than the public may think, administrators said. The culture of fraternities, big sports and big parties remains a challenge, but at many schools, students themselves reported the majority of health violations.
“When this started the premise was that students would not and could not behave responsibly,” said Michael Kotlikoff, Cornell University’s provost. “I think we’ve proven that this is not so.”
Many university officials say they are also increasingly confident that the virus is not being transmitted in classrooms, where professors are enforcing mask wearing and social distancing rules.
“We have not had a single case that we can trace to a classroom,” said Mike Haynie, vice chancellor for strategic initiatives and innovation at Syracuse University. “It happened in communal living situations and in gatherings that took place off campus.”
Mr. Haynie cited a study of 70,000 undergraduates at Indiana University, which found that the more classes a student took in person, the lower the likelihood that student would become infected with the coronavirus.
“The spread is in teacher break rooms, in fraternities and sororities,” Dr. Frieden said. “It’s not even in organized sports but in locker rooms before and pizza parties after.”
Syracuse has seen a “significant decrease” in undergraduates signing up for remote learning in the spring, indicating that more will elect to live on campus, said Ellen James Mbuqe, a spokeswoman. The university had about 15,000 students on campus this fall and expects the number to grow in the spring.
Steven Constable, a geophysicist at U.C. San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and chair of the school’s academic senate, said data showing negligible transmission in classrooms had helped bring skeptical university employees on board with the university’s plan to add some in-person classes.
“You could argue that our lecture halls are one of the safer places to be in San Diego right now,” he said.
Instructors at other schools have been a harder sell. At the University of Florida, faculty have filed grievances over the school’s decision to offer 5,394 sections of face-to-face classes, 72 more than were offered last January, before the pandemic hit the United States. Concerns have persisted even though the school, which offered only optional testing this fall when it invited its 50,000 students back to campus, will expand its testing regimen, requiring that all students living on campus or taking classes in person be tested every two weeks in the spring.
Some faculty are also revolting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The university sent most students home a week after classes began in August because of an outbreak, but is now proposing to bring 2,000 students back to campus residence halls, on top of 1,500 who were allowed to stay during the fall for hardship reasons. It will also offer about one out of five classes in person in the spring semester.
This month, about 70 faculty members signed an open letter, published in the student newspaper, that predicted a repeat of the fall debacle. “We have every reason to expect that the university will — once again — be overwhelmed by infections when classes resume,” the letter said.
But the university’s president, Kevin Guskiewicz, said he was confident the university could pull it off. “We’re working from a different starting place than we were in the fall,” he said.
The value of aggressive coronavirus testing has been one of the major lessons of the fall. “We changed our testing protocols substantially over the semester,” said Michael Fitts, Tulane’s president. “At one point, we moved it up to three times a week, and we found that was very effective, and we will continue that in the spring.”
Tulane has access to two testing machines through its medical school, which can conduct 3,000 tests a day and have results back in 12 hours. “I will say our positivity rate was much lower than New Orleans,” Mr. Fitts said of the university, which calls the city home.
Syracuse learned its lesson after Halloween, when the lab it was using produced results too slowly and transmission got out of hand, Mr. Haynie said. Now the university has its own testing lab, within the biology department. For the spring, it plans to double its capacity to about 300,000 tests between January and May.
“We realized we had to have full control and autonomy,” Mr. Haynie said.
Similarly Cornell University set up a lab in its veterinary school, where it can perform 35,000 to 40,000 tests a week and get results back in as little as eight hours. U.C. San Diego is processing its own tests, too.
U.C. San Diego is doing not only standard swab testing, but also testing wastewater, expanding contact tracing with a phone app and moving instruction to outdoor classrooms. As of Saturday, the school had recorded only about 70 cases since March among the more than 9,000 students living on campus, according to the school dashboard.
“It’s like a Swiss cheese model,” said Pradeep Khosla, U.C. San Diego’s chancellor and an engineer who specializes in system building. “Every layer has its holes, but put together, it’s a solid block.”
Most college officials do not expect a vaccine to be available for students in the spring term. But many universities, like the University of Kentucky, are planning to be integrally involved in the distribution of vaccines through their health systems, which will position them for providing it on campus when the time comes.
Though a vaccine might seem the light at the end of the Covid tunnel, it will also pose a new challenge for university administrators, said Crystal Watson, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“Will they make it mandatory for students, staff and faculty?” she asked. “If not, will vaccination be required for some type of the population but not others? That’s a big open question.”
Dr. Watson said that however far colleges have come, there is still a large gap between the wish for normalcy and the reality. “Right now it looks so different from what a traditional campus would look like,” she said. “The students are getting such a bad deal this year. It really stinks.”
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