This month, many colleges around the country plan to welcome back thousands of students into something they hope will resemble normal campus life. But they face challenges unlike any other American institution — containing the coronavirus among a young, impulsive population that not only studies together, but lives together, parties together, and, if decades of history are any guide, sleeps together.
It will be a hugely complex and costly endeavor requiring far more than just the reconfiguring of dorm rooms and cafeterias and the construction of annexes and tent classrooms to increase social distancing. It also crucially involves the creation of testing programs capable of serving communities the size of small cities and the enforcement of codes of conduct among students not eager to be policed.
Who will be tested for the coronavirus and how quickly can they get results? Will mask wearing be mandated? And what will happen to tailgating, keg parties and sneaking into your partner’s dorm room? Colleges are mapping strategies as varied as the contrasting Covid regulations enacted by the states, reflecting the culture and leadership of their schools.
Syracuse is vowing to play the strict parent, requiring students to sign codes of conduct with penalties for violating Covid-19 rules more severe than the punishment for smoking marijuana. But the University of Kentucky is presenting a more lenient front, adopting existing honor codes that urge students to “promote personal responsibility and peer accountability.”
And the University of Texas-Austin has prohibited students from holding parties on or off campus, banned overnight guests in dorm rooms and warned students that they can be disciplined for “purposefully invading the personal space of others,” at least without a face mask on.
All of these efforts are coming at great cost, potentially adding more than $70 billion to the budgets of the nation’s 5,000 colleges. Yet college administrators say giving their constituents — students and their families — at least a taste of college life is worth it, if done in the safest possible way. Whether those constituents agree is an open question, and complaints about tuition have led a growing number of schools to offer rebates.
It is still possible that the frantic planning will come to naught. Almost daily, universities that had released detailed plans for in-person classes this semester have reversed themselves and said they will go almost entirely online. On Friday, the University of Pennsylvania became the latest, announcing that almost all undergraduate classes would be taught online and that undergraduates returning to Philadelphia, regardless of whether they were living on or off campus, would have to take a minimum of two Covid tests to participate in any Penn activities this fall.
“We have learned how to close safely,” Hiram Chodosh, president of Claremont McKenna College, a liberal arts school in Claremont, Calif., said. “But the big question now is, can we open safely?”
Testing capacity, a problem in communities throughout the country, varies widely among schools and could play a major role in whether they can remain open during an outbreak.
Big schools, from Syracuse University to the University of California, San Diego, that have connections to labs, health programs or medical schools say they are capable of processing large numbers of Covid tests in 24 to 48 hours.
In a typical big-school plan, the University of California, Berkeley, will test all residential students within 24 hours of their arrival, for free, using either a standard nasal swab or a saliva test being developed by an internationally renowned genomics research lab on campus. Students will subsequently be sequestered for 7 to 10 days, leaving their single dorm rooms only to go (masked) to the bathroom or to pick up a meal from a central location in the building or outside, then retested. If they test positive, they’ll be isolated in a special dorm. (Some schools hope to create supportive communities, along the lines of an old-fashioned TB sanitarium, for students who test positive.) After that, everyone living on campus will be tested regularly, twice a month, if the spit test proves to be accurate enough.
But little Cornell College in Iowa, with only 1,000 students, is not doing universal testing on arrival, believing that it would give a false sense of security because of the incubation period. The school will be doing randomized rapid testing of 3 percent of its asymptomatic students per week through its health center, which will take just a few minutes to get results. It will reserve the more sophisticated testing, with the help of the county health department, for students who show symptoms. Other small schools in similar situations are finding themselves at the mercy of private labs that can take days to deliver results, making results almost meaningless.
But even some big schools are worried about testing backlogs. “If we have to wait days for a result,” said Michael Haynie, Syracuse’s vice chancellor of Strategic Initiatives and Innovation, “the quarantine requirements will overwhelm us before we even get started.”
Alison Byerly, president of Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa., cited worries about testing supplies as a reason to shift all classes online, and to ask most students to study from home.
Cost is an issue. Delaware State University, an historically black college, is among several that have enlisted the nonprofit Testing for America and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, among others, to help finance its testing program.
So is personal freedom. Despite Florida’s high infection rate, the University of Florida has declined to force students to be tested, worrying some local officials and residents in Gainesville who fear that students could cause an outbreak in the city. Although Florida has among the highest per capita rates of infection in the country, the university is mandating testing only for athletes, those who report Covid-19 symptoms and a few other exceptions. “The Gator Nation will not be deterred,” says the school’s reopening plan.
“We’re a public institution, so constitutional considerations come into play in terms of what we require — and how we will be able to enforce that requirement,” said Ken Garcia, a campus spokesman, in an email. And testing backlogs are a major issue, university officials said in a university webcast.
Equally daunting is the task of regulating the behavior of an age group known for its risk-taking behavior.
Many schools have adopted social compacts and behavior codes. Masks are a key part of almost every code, to be worn except in situations like brushing teeth, walking alone outside, or being alone in a dorm room.
Most ban partying or socializing outside “social pods” — the small groups of students that some colleges are assigning students to, usually based on their dorms. Penalties for code violations range from being kicked out of class and counseled, to eviction from campus housing and expulsion.
The word “sex” is not mentioned in the typical behavior code. Some colleges may try to prohibit overnight visits in dorms, and many are stressing the obvious risks intimate contact poses of spreading the virus. But most administrators seem to believe that a rule banning sex is unrealistic, and are quietly hoping that students will use common sense and refrain from, say, having it with people outside their pod.
The Coronavirus Outbreak ›
Frequently Asked Questions
Updated July 27, 2020
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Should I refinance my mortgage?
- It could be a good idea, because mortgage rates have never been lower. Refinancing requests have pushed mortgage applications to some of the highest levels since 2008, so be prepared to get in line. But defaults are also up, so if you’re thinking about buying a home, be aware that some lenders have tightened their standards.
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What is school going to look like in September?
- It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.
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Is the coronavirus airborne?
- The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization.
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What are the symptoms of coronavirus?
- Common symptoms include fever, a dry cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. Some of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses and stuffy sinuses are less common. The C.D.C. has also added chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache and a new loss of the sense of taste or smell as symptoms to look out for. Most people fall ill five to seven days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days.
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Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?
- So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.
“I think at some point, if you treat young people like adults, they are going to act like adults,” Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University, said. “In the end, we’re not going to patrol every aspect of their lives.”
Or, as one official at another college, put it: “Could there be love in the pod? I guess so.”
The behavior codes generally apply both on and off campus, though they are clearly harder to enforce off-campus, and some students say that they immediately began looking for off-campus housing when they realized where rules would be strictly supervised.
The rules of local governments also apply.
“In Berkeley, indoor gatherings which would constitute a party or are outside of your social pod are forbidden,” Dan Mogulof, a spokesman for the university, said. “So we are and are going to remain consistent with what the city’s rules are, and we have to run everything through them.”
But students say social pods, especially when assigned by administrators, could quickly fracture if one or two students have a falling out.
West Virginia University has persuaded the governor to shut down bars serving students at its Morgantown campus after a Covid outbreak in the area, Mr. Gee said. It has been in effect for about two weeks, and he would like to renew it.
“Bars get people together in small places, and they cause these kids to really really, really get too damn close to each other,” Mr. Gee said.
Travel restrictions are also common. In an email to students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School two weeks ago, before the school went mainly online, Maryellen Reilly, deputy vice dean, said that students would be expected to limit all unnecessary travel.
“Does this mean that if your spouse or partner lives in D.C. or N.Y. that you can’t go visit for the weekend?,” her email said. “Unfortunately, yes. The risk of bringing germs back and forth is too great — this also means we ask that you don’t have visitors who could be traveling with the virus.”
Already some students are pushing back against codes of conduct and choosing either to skip the semester or live off-campus, where they can control their own environment.
Maria Gray, a junior at Bates College in Maine, was horrified when she paged through enrollment documents and found that she was being asked to sign a legal document with her digital PIN. “I acknowledge and agree that by committing to attend Bates College as an on-campus residential student, I am voluntarily assuming any and all risks,” the statement said, ending with a warning that the outcome of getting sick with Covid-19 could be “disability, or even death.”
That document was scary enough. But then on Friday, the school sent her an email saying that students could have to evacuate campus within 24-48 hours if there were an outbreak, and to bring only what they could easily pack. That made a closing seem inevitable.
“I have faith in people to be responsible and understand the stakes,” said Ms. Gray, who now plans to study online at her home in Portland, Ore. “But also, this shouldn’t be a life or death thing. The stakes just got really high really fast.”
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