Coronavirus Impact
The Washington Post reports that, as the academic year begins on campus and virtually, counseling center directors across the country are hoping to provide mental health support to those who need it. Barry Schreier, director of the University Counseling Service at the University of Iowa and a spokesman for the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, said, “Providing support during a pandemic is unchartered territory, but the unexpected is nothing new for college counseling centers who learn to lean into the need.” Ben Locke, Director of the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) at Pennsylvania State University, said that counseling centers have made improvements that allow students to see a counselor sooner, shortening wait times that previously could stretch to a week or more.
Inside Higher Ed reports on a recent study from the Student Experience in the Research University Consortium that shows about one-third of undergraduate, graduate and professional school students screened during the summer were found to have depression or anxiety, or both. This is a higher rate than seen in years past.
NPR reports on the wide variance in pandemic response plans at college across the country. The College Crisis Initiative, a project of Davidson College that tracks colleges’ responses, reported that, among the 2,958 institutions it tracks, 151 were planning to open fully online, 729 were mostly online and 433 were taking a hybrid approach. Just 75 schools were insisting on students attending fully in person, and 614 were aiming to be primarily in-person. About 800 others were still deciding. According to NPR, decisions regarding reopening plans often have little correlation with the public health situation in the region the campus is located in. Reopening decisions are often dictated as much by local, fiscal, and political orders than by epidemiology. Students are navigating this novel situation without clear guidance, after sending tuition checks and signing leases for campus and off-campus housing.
COVID-19 testing approaches this fall also vary widely. Inside Higher Ed reports that while some plan on twice-weekly testing of students or employees, others have no plans to offer testing on the campus at all. Gerri Taylor, co-chair of the American College Health Association’s task force on COVID, said, “It is all over the place.” She said the task force “agonized” over whether to recommend colleges perform testing beyond the amount recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And while Taylor believes testing of all students and employees multiple times a week “would be great in an ideal world,” it is costly. “This is a topic that keeps coming up, but we recognize that there are many small and medium-sized colleges that could not support this type of strategy,” she said. “What we need is more cost-efficient tests, more availability.”
A New York Times survey tracking COVID-19 cases at more than 1,500 American colleges and universities, is finding at least 26,000 cases and 64 deaths since the pandemic began. The Times has counted more than 20,000 additional cases at colleges since late July. The Times reports that colleges are deciding for themselves how to tally cases, and so this number represents an undercount. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA), Tina Smith (MN) and Chris Murphy (CT) are requesting top federal health officials develop a national strategy and standards for collecting and publicly reporting data on coronavirus outbreaks linked to college campuses.
Colleges and universities that have brought students back to campus have seen alarming spikes in infections. The Washington Post reported more than 500 cases at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, nearly 160 at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and dozens at the University of Southern California.
Prior to students’ return and the spike in cases at the University of Alabama, the New York Times examined the state’s student testing effort, led by the state’s public health department along with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a leading academic medical center. The initiative focuses on testing more than 160,000 students for the virus before they arrive at 59 local colleges and universities. According to the Times, Alabama students would also be required to wear masks and follow social-distancing guidelines; Many are required to use a daily symptom-checking app developed by U.A.B. Last week, the university released a second app, which would alert students to possible virus exposures.
With outbreaks at schools across the country, administrators are issuing demands to students to help curtail the spread of the virus, warning that everyone could be sent home. Administrators have grown increasingly aggressive in their messaging, which is often directed at typical hot spots like fraternities, sororities and upperclassmen throwing off-campus parties. In a message to students sent after suspending a fraternity for partying, Eric Barron, the president of Pennsylvania State University, asked, “Do you want to be the person responsible for sending everyone home?”
This week, the Ohio State University temporarily suspended more than 200 students for violating COVID-19 safety protocols. Syracuse University gave interim suspensions to 23 students following a gathering on the quad that drew hundreds of freshmen.
The New York Times reports that the early outbreaks underscore the gap between policy, messaging and enforcement, and the limitations that colleges face in controlling the behavior of young people. “On-campus restrictions are being undermined by off-campus partying. Student codes of conduct are being signed and promptly forgotten. Day-to-day policing is often falling to teaching assistants and residential advisers who have mixed feelings about confronting scofflaw undergraduates sitting in the front row or living in the next dorm room,” the article states.
In an article titled, The Student Blaming Has Begun, the Chronicle asks whether it is fair to fault students for the outbreaks. The article cited Julia L. Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, who said, “What’s happening on college campuses is a microcosm of what’s happening in this country, which is a deflection of responsibility from the top down to the individual.” She continued, “It’s unconscionable for these administrators to be shaming and blaming and punishing their students for what we all knew would happen. For any of us who take a minute to put ourselves back in our 18-year-old selves, asking students to essentially lock themselves in their rooms for a semester isn’t going to be an effective public-health approach.”
CNN spoke with several experts about the reasons behind students’ risky decisions amid the pandemic. Ben Locke, the senior director for Counseling & Psychological Services at Pennsylvania State University, explained that young adults are wired to make impulsive decisions – their brains are still developing, and the brain region sensitive to social rewards is developing much faster than the part of the brain responsible for rational, consequence-driven decision making. “Their decision making … is more about ‘what’s in the moment, what am I missing out on, what is the thing that would make me happiest in this moment?’” Hannah Schacter, an assistant professor and developmental psychologist at Wayne State University, explained that young adults depend on social connections to build their identities. She said, “No one’s going back to college because they want to sit in their dorm all weekend by themselves.” She also noted that students are getting mixed messages from adults. Many may assume it is safe to resume their lives because schools have reopened. “We can’t control much, but we can control what sort of opportunities students have to break these rules,” she said. “Most college campuses are literally engineered to promote social interaction. Students coming back … must navigate this in a way it wasn’t built for.”
At the University of Chapel Hill, which announced it would go all-online for undergraduate instruction after 135 new coronavirus cases were reported on campus over 7 days, many students and professors are asking whether the university should have opened at all. “Some students have expressed disappointment and anger over the schools’ decisions. One student said, “I think the school was naïve in thinking that they could open up. I was naïve, too, thinking they could contain this. It’s kind of embarrassing.” One parent expressed concern about the effect of the canceled semester on students’ mental health. “It’s sad,” she said. “My heart breaks for them because it really is an experience they’re missing out on – that normal experience. Now they’re going to go back into their little isolated world again.”
Public health experts say that the experiences of UNC Chapel Hill and the University of Notre Dame, which took instruction online after tallying 147 positive cases, should be a warning to other colleges considering reopening in person that they will face their own outbreaks. “For universities going back to more or less in-person operations, this is extremely likely without aggressive testing plans,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington.”I think it was entirely predictable.”
Education Dive reports that student-run news publications have been among the most vocal critics of colleges’ reopening plans, with several writing scathing editorials deriding administrators’ decisions. An op-ed in The Daily Tar Heel, the newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill proclaimed, “You spoke. The university didn’t listen,” and listed at least nine missteps the school had made in reopening. A later Tar Heel editorial noted, “We’re tired of the gaslighting, tired of the secrecy, tired of being treated like cash cows by a University with such blatant disregard for our lives.” An editorial in the student newspaper at the University of Kansas slammed the school’s plans to start in-person classes next week and demanded a switch to remote learning. “It appears that the science used to build the Protect KU plan is economics,” it says. “Students have become the revenue KU needs to stay open. Health and education, meanwhile, are subverted for the sake of a few weeks of cash.”
VICE reports that this fall, some RAs are being asked to go above and way beyond the typical expectations for their role, amid the reopening of residence halls and many of these student employees are approaching the new school year with trepidation. One RA who had spent several weeks with his residents said that he and his fellow RAs haven’t received any specialized COVID-19 training, though it’s “come down through the ranks” that they’re in charge of monitoring their residents’ compliance with school policy. He said students don’t tend to take his authority seriously when it comes to COVID-19. Another RA going into his first year on the job said, told VICE “I feel slightly uncomfortable going back.. I’m fine doing what has to be done, but I hope it doesn’t have to cost me my life/well-being.”
Some colleges across the country including Rutgers University, Williams College, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Georgetown, Spelman and Clark Atlanta University are cutting campus fees or dropping tuition costs. But the majority of schools including Temple University, University of Massachusetts, Harvard and Stanford, are keeping tuition as is. Terry Hartle, an advocate for higher education as senior vice president of the American Council on Education, defended their financial decisions. “I think universities handled this about as well as they could possibly have handled it,” he said. “Every institution of higher education … has suffered significant revenue losses. Room and board revenue has fallen, other auxiliary revenue — the conference center, the summer camps, the international students, the hotel, the bookstore — all of those have just largely disappeared.”
