Bryan Alexander

I’m writing this in haste, as I’ve been spending hours in meetings, interviews, and class preparation.  I have an experimental teaching game to share shortly, among other news.

Yet at full speed I wanted to share some datapoints from today concerning COVID-19 and higher education.

ITEM: Another student died of the pandemic.

A University of Dayton student has died, apparently from complications due to COVID-19, the school reported today.

Michael Lang, 18, a first-year student in the College of Arts and Sciences from LaGrange, Illinois, died Thursday, Oct. 22, following a lengthy hospitalization, UD says.

That makes five coronavirus campus deaths this fall, according to my count: three students, one security officer, and a university president.

(I don’t know any other trackers on this score.  And I fear that these stories will vanish as they make us uncomfortable, occur in rural or flyover areas, and don’t take place on elite/media-friendly campuses.)

ITEM: another campus declared a Toggle Term.* This time it’s HBCU Florida Memorial University, and they will spend the rest of the semester online.  That’s about 24 cases for the current semester.

ITEM: Lilah Burke reports on how infection rates spiked early this term for some universities, but have dropped steadily since.  Negative reactions have also dropped: “As colleges have continued to rack up cases, the outrage and concern that once met them has become quieter.”

ITEM: some campuses are pushing for more faculty and grad students to return to the in-person classroom.  Northeastern University is making such a push for spring term.  This is a change from fall:

ITEM: a university chancellor told his community to avoid large scale gatherings, then went to a Trump rally.

ITEM: American tuition and fees rose more slowly this year than at any time since the 1990s.

ITEM: Pew Research surveyed Americans about their attitudes towards higher education this semester.  I’d like to share two findings from it.

First, political party affiliation is closely linked with assessing how colleges and universities opened up for in-person education.  Republicans tended to see opening up as a good thing, while Democrats oppose this view.  Taken together, we Americans are split right down the middle:

Second, a clear majority think online learning is inferior to face-to-face education:

ITEM: COVID-19 infections are rising not only in number, but also in age, according to the CDC.  Bloomberg summarizes thusly:

Cases generally rise first among highly social young people, including recently returning college students. Then, they slowly bubble up among older demographics, in part through multigenerational housing and other interactions.

“including recently returning college students”: again with campuses causing infections, and deaths, to spread. Which does bring us back to the question I asked yesterday.

ITEM: The New York Times published a good summary of some recent developments.  I’d like to share the ones that struck me as most significant.  It may also be behind a paywall.

• “By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least $120 billion” – my readers might not be surprised by this, since I’ve been forecasting and making other observations along these lines.  Still, it’s bracing.  To put it in crude perspective, imagine that’s around $27 million per individual campus.  Or think of it this way: what if $120 billion is too low?
• Mergers are being accelerated.  For example, “the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education… board of governors… voted to forge ahead with a proposal to merge a half-dozen small schools into two academic entities.”
• Poor and working class student enrollment is declining: “A survey of 292 private, nonprofit schools released this month by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities reported a nearly 8 percent decrease in enrollment among students who receive federal Pell Grants.”
• That class-based enrollment drop is also hitting graduate schools: “Suzanne T. Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, noted that interrupting that [grad school] pipeline could also have a lingering impact on the higher education work force, diverting promising students from low-income households, for example, or discouraging candidates who might bring much needed diversity to faculty rosters.”
• Faculty cuts are looming.
• Plus other topics you all heard here already.

Where does all of this leave us?  I have many thoughts and no time to share them tonight.  More from me later – but I’d be delighted to read yours in the comment boxes below.

*Toggle Term: this is when a campus changes its COVID-19 response during a semester in a big way.  Typically it means switching between in-person and on-line education.

(thanks to this Inside Higher Ed roundup and this Chronicle of Higher Education one)

Yesterday my wife and I took another long walk.  It’s become a Saturday routine for us, doing a four mile loop from our house and through the surrounding area.  We mask up and rigorously maintain social distancing, quickly shunning anyone who walks, stands, or bicycles anywhere near Ceredwyn and I.

At the farthest distance from our house we visited a refurbished furniture store, checking on bookshelves, tools, and creepy kitchenware.

  The shop is excellent about pandemic measures, with everyone masked up and keeping the heck away from each other.  Appropriately for an establishment emphasizing repair and DIY, they built their own plexiglas shielding at the counter.  This time, however, we struck out, finding nothing good.

Walking back home, we discussed where COVID-19 was headed and pondered how the election might play out (because that’s how we roll). The temperature dropped and skies tended towards gray, despite the sun’s best efforts.

We talked about higher education and what was happening to it now.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that academia just took several very bad hits.  Obviously these are financial and biological, as my readers know well.  But I wondered, and wonder now, if in addition our reputation just dropped a notch.

I’m not thinking of any individual campus, but of higher ed as a whole.

Let’s start with the sense that some people have, that higher ed is spreading COVID-19.  Not that colleges and universities started the thing, of course, but that we are making it worse.  For example, the Washington Post introduced one article with this stark headline:

After a college town’s coronavirus outbreak, deaths at nursing homes mount

Can you read that in any way that isn’t awful?  Try paraphrasing it: “Colleges kill old people.”  Or try a milder translation: “Campuses actively threaten senior citizens.”

If you think the editor just slapped a scary headline on a gentler article to get eyeballs, read the actual story.  Here’s the start:

Mayor Tim Kabat was already on edge as thousands of students returned to La Crosse, Wis., to resume classes this fall at the city’s three colleges. When he saw young people packing downtown bars and restaurants in September, crowded closely and often unmasked, the longtime mayor’s worry turned to dread.

Now, more than a month later, La Crosse has endured a devastating spike in coronavirus cases — a wildfire of infection that first appeared predominantly in the student-age population, spread throughout the community and ultimately ravaged elderly residents who had previously managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic.

Two sentences in and already we have a community figure viewing colleges with dread. Third sentence and campuses are typhoid Maries, “ravag[ing] elders.”

The article doesn’t let up.  It goes on:

For most of 2020, La Crosse’s nursing homes had lost no one to covid-19. In recent weeks, the county has recorded 19 deaths, most of them in long-term care facilities. Everyone who died was over 60. Fifteen of the victims were 80 or older. The spike offers a vivid illustration of the perils of pushing a herd-immunity strategy, as infections among younger people can fuel broader community outbreaks that ultimately kill some of the most vulnerable residents.

Try paraphrasing or generalizing from that passage.  Wisconsin colleges kill old people. Campuses kill grandparents.  This is not, as they say, a good look.

We can go further.  Linked from the article is an academic study, a preprint examining viral spread in La Crosse.  From the abstract:

Genomic sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 cases in La Crosse during that period found rapid expansion of two viral substrains. Although the majority of cases were among college-age individuals, from a total of 111 genomes sequenced we identified rapid transmission of the virus into more vulnerable populations. Eight sampled genomes represented two independent transmission events into two skilled nursing facilities, resulting in two fatalities.

In other words, there’s a causal vector between college operations and off-campus seniors sickening and dying.

A skeptical reader at this point could observe that Wisconsin is an unusually bad case.  COVID-19 is really growing there, apparently aided by a Republican legislature.  Here’s today’s 91-DIVOC visualization:

Wisconsin soared even past Florida!

But other states are also seeing this pattern of rising academic infections leading to off-campus illness and death.  Texas, leading the nation in infections, also has examples of town-goal virulence.  In Lubbock, for example:

As football fans tailgated without masks outside Texas Tech University’s 60,000-seat stadium in West Texas this weekend ahead of the Red Raiders’ homecoming game, it was easy to forget that Lubbock — a rural county of 310,000 — has one of the highest coronavirus infection rates in the country.

The outbreak at Texas Tech, which has infected at least 2,200 students, comes as the U.S. reported a national single-day record of new infections — 83,757 — Friday. Part of what’s driving the national increase in infections has been a surge in college towns where restrictions have eased since students returned this fall. And nowhere is it more prevalent than in Texas — which has more infected college students than any other state in the country, 17,133, according to a New York Times database — and at Texas Tech itself, with more infected students than any other school statewide.

If I read the Texas Tech dashboard correctly, only 206 people at that institution are presently infected.  Their trends page shows an alarming spike in August and September, with things down to a simmer now:

Yet, as the LA Times observes, “[b]ecause student testing is voluntary, the number of infections could actually be significantly higher.”

Last week I pointed to the case of the University of Michigan, whose rising infections prompted the county medical authorities – not, note, the university’s – to order undergrads to shelter in place.  UM’s dashboard shows rising cases over the past few weeks, both among academics and those living in the immediate area:

We can think about this data and these events in several ways.  First, campuses that welcome back students are all too often experiencing infections.  Second, they can then infect – and sicken, injure, and kill – people in the surrounding areas.  Third, campus leaders are willing to risk such illness, injury, and death for financial reasons: to keep their institutions going.

Surely these thoughts must make American colleges and universities look like monsters or incompetent, dangerous, bumblers.

And yet.

I’m not a marketer.  I know I can have a difficult time sussing out popular attitudes (for example).  So take this with a grain of salt, but there are some ways Americans might look more favorably upon our COVID-spreading campuses.

Our love of college sports Some broad tranche of American culture deeply loves our athletics, football and basketball in particular.  Football obviously causes a spectacular range of injuries in its normal course of operations, but we accept them as part of the game.  Perhaps this population will similarly accept coronavirus spread as a necessary cost of doing a much valued business.

Our love of the physical campus and disdain for online schooling The physical college or university environment holds a special place in our national consciousness.  It hosts a residential experience for some, which we clearly value very highly (cf Ian Bogost’s recent column).  Apparently that valuation is high enough that we’ll pay a special fee this year.  Back to the LA Times piece:

Joyce Zachman, executive director of the nonprofit Texas Tech Parents Assn., said she hears more concern from parents about students being forced to take classes online than about them catching COVID-19.

“It’s not the college experience that parents had hoped for their kids,” said Zachman, who’s asthmatic but still attended Saturday’s game, where fans sang the school fight song with its chorus of “Wreck ’Em!” and pointed their trigger fingers in the Texas Tech “guns up” victory sign.

Did you catch that first bit?  Zachman is more worried that students will take classes online than that they might catch COVID-19.   While some of us might find this an astonishing view, it is, apparently, a view held by enough people to matter.

COVID-19 is less dangerous than it was I have heard from some conservative friends and commentators that while coronavirus infections might be rising, hospitalizations and deaths are not following suit.

Consider 91-DIVOC data.  Infections are definitely rising, now on par with the worst levels America has yet experienced:

Yet deaths are not rising to that degree.  Instead, they are growing slightly, still below recent months’ tolls, and far below the terrible spring outbreak:

Hospitals have improved their ability to treat infected people. So perhaps some see colleges spreading the virus, but that it’s less of a problem than it once was.

Political partisanship Obviously American culture is increasingly divided by party, and the onrushing election is heightening that split.  We know that Republicans are much more critical of higher education than are Democrats.  Perhaps the latter will maintain their academic support, especially as many fear the GOP is avoiding the science necessary to save the country.

Academic research Universities are, among other things, institutions that conduct vital research for the pandemic.  American society might cut us some slack for this, especially if any campus plays a role in offering a successful vaccine.

Geographical displacement Stories of bad outbreaks might occur elsewhere, far beyond our local institutions.  If we don’t see horrors nearby, we might set them aside.

Taken together, these views – in favor of campus life and sports, political partisanship, attitudes towards the pandemic, the power of research, localis – might protect academia’s reputation.  Or the sentiment that campuses are plague zones, active contributors in making the crisis worse could take hold.

We can test out my theories by checking the next polls of American attitudes towards higher ed.

(thanks to my wife and Jean Potvin)

To forecast the future, it’s crucial to understand the present.

I’ve followed that principle for years.  It informs my work on many levels.  That’s why today I’d like to give you all a sense of where higher education stands in the middle of October, 2020, as it grapples with COVID-19.  We need to do this in order to think more effectively about where we’re headed next.

I’ve been meaning to update you all for several weeks.  But this season I’m brain-deep in climate change work, plus engaged with teaching two seminars and immersed in several other projects.  Still, I want to catch us all up on where things stand with the pandemic, especially as it’s proving decisive for the American election, and as we grope towards what the thing could do over the next few years.

Let’s start with the virus, move on to what colleges and universities are doing, then offer some thoughts about what this all tells us about possible 2021s.

Fair warning: this is a heavy post, long, carrying lots of data, and addressing a horrific subject.  I’ve included visualizations and photos which might break up the stress.

I: THE PANDEMIC GROWS

On October 16th, 2020, COVID-19 continues to spread across the world, sickening, injuring, and killing.

Data vary depending on one’s source, but the overall picture is fairly clear.  Global infection numbers range from 38,789,204 to 39,126,112 and 39,474,896 people. Deaths are now clearly over one million: 1,095,097 to 1,106,870 to 1,100,877.

In the United States between 7,958,254 and 8,267,053 people are infected, amounting to around 2.4% of the population. American deaths are in a range of nearly a quarter million, 216,917 to 218,137 and 223,359. Those numbers are likely an undercount, as tens of thousands of “excess deaths” (deaths above recent history, yet not assigned to COVID) have been occurring for months; at least one paper sees actual deaths being up to 20% higher, or around 260-267,000. (sources: Centers for Disease Control, Johns Hopkins University, the World Health Organization, Worldometers)

There are no good national or global numbers about people injured by infections, suffering damages that may last them for some time, whom some call long haulers.

Here’s the iconic Johns Hopkins dashboard for today:

To give you a sense of perspective, of how quickly human horror and wastage have swollen, here’s where things stood six months ago, on the same dashboard, but for April 14th:

The virus is unevenly distributed by nations, and that distribution has changed over the past year.  91-DIVOC‘s visualization shows this clearly in terms of infections:

Based on that data, the European Union, the United States, and Britain, are now experiencing massive infection rises, while the huge waves which attacked Brazil and India are now subsiding.

The unfortunately named Information is Beautiful site presents infections and deaths in absolute terms:

In the United States, every region is now experiencing rising infections:

The butcher’s bill presents differently, as the west and especially south are on downhill trajectories, thankfully.  But the number of deaths in the northeast and midwest are rising:

The COVID Tracking Project says the United States is now in a third pandemic wave.

The third surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is under way. Outbreaks have been worsening in many states for more than a month, and new COVID-19 cases jumped 18 percent this week, bringing the seven-day average to more than 51,000 cases a day. Though testing rose by 8 percent nationally, that’s not enough of an increase to explain the steep rise in cases. Meanwhile, COVID-19 hospitalizations, which had previously been creeping upward slowly, jumped more than 14 percent from a week earlier.

Looking ahead, projections uniformly indicate more infections and deaths, unsurprisingly.  The University of Washington’s IHME project forecasts three possible global death toll outcomes by February 2021, from 1.8 to nearly 3.5 million:

For the United States:

In the short term, IHME sees around 230,000 dead by America’s election day:

Many in the US anticipate a vaccine to staunch the bleeding.  Some look forward to herd immunity.

In the meantime, American public health and medicare care are very unevenly distributed.

BREAKING—Chris Christie was not only hospitalized, but he was in the ICU for 7-days… and he got special VIP access to Eli Lily’s synthetic monoclonal antibody drug direct from the manufacturer (it’s not available to general public since it’s not FDA approved). That’s privilege. pic.twitter.com/YjSdyrWxFs

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) October 15, 2020

II. HIGHER EDUCATION STRUGGLES WITH COVID

So how is higher education grappling with this terrible pandemic?

(For reasons of time I’m going to focus on the United States.) It’s actually difficult to answer this question.  We have to take several different approaches.

We can start by checking on national data about colleges, universities, and COVID-19.  Unfortunately, shamefully, disastrously for present and future, we don’t have any data we can use. The CDC offers some guidance but is not tracking the viral spread across higher education.  The United States Department of Education publishes no such data.  The White House Coronavirus Task Force, which manages to issue recommendations to individual states while having no official website that I can discover, also fails to share anything on this score. Neither leading journal of academia publishes a national dashboard or even total stats. No nonprofit has done this, nor any business that I can find.

The best we have right now, as best I can determine, is a single New York Times web page. Back in August the Times tried to aggregate as much collegiate information as they could.  As I wrote then, the results were poor: only a fraction of the higher education ecosystem was touched, the data incompatible, and all of it spread across uneven timelines.  And this took dozens of reports some undisclosed amount of time to eke out.

Since then that tracker has improved somewhat.  It now claims 1,700 campuses, or nearly 40% of the whole: better, if not sufficient.  The problems I identified are otherwise still there.  At least the page is quite honest about its limitations, once you scroll down a bit:

With no national tracking system, and statewide data available only sporadically, colleges are making their own rules for how to tally infections. While The Times’s survey is believed to be the most comprehensive account available, it is also a near-certain undercount… [A]t least 140 other [campuses] ignored inquiries or refused to answer questions…

And:

Because colleges report data differently, and because cases continued to emerge even in the months when most campuses were closed, The Times is counting all reported cases since the start of the pandemic.

It’s been eight days since the last update to the page.  Sigh.

Given those caveats, what does the Times tracker tell us?  Their headline claim is “more than 178,000 cases and at least 70 deaths” infections… since the virus hit American shores.  What about fall semester?

The Times has counted more than 171,000 additional cases at colleges since late July; of those, more than 48,000 cases came since late September.

So… it’s hard to say what this tells us, since “since late July” includes both summer and fall terms, and “since late September” leaves out the first weeks of the semester, depending on campus schedules.  We can reasonably guess some tens of thousands of academics, probably? over one hundred thousand, have been infected this term.  But the number should be much higher, given the Times’ admitted undercount.  For example, if the tracker only catches 40% of colleges and universities, and we estimate 100,000 infections in that sample, we could project a reality closer to 240,000.

What about deaths?  How many members of the academic world have perished due to COVID-19?  Again, there is no national record of this.  I have tracked four so far, each of which I’ve shared via Twitter:

1. Chad Dorrill, a student at Appalachian State University
2. Jamain Stephens Jr., a student at California University of Pennsylvania
3. James Hamilton, a police officer at the University of North Carolina- Asheville
4. Irving Pressley McPhail, president of St. Augustine’s University

Prior to fall term, Osanette Hernandez died in August.  She was a nursing student; I can’t determine where she was studying.

How many others have died?  What are their stories, their very names?  Is anyone even bothering to record them?

If we can’t get good data for how COVID hits academic populations, we could instead examine the macro picture by looking to campus operational strategies for fall 2020.  According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s tracker (last updated more than two weeks ago), itself based on Davidson College’s College Crisis Dashboard, American colleges and universities have adopted a wide variety of educational configurations:

Entirely online, mostly online, mostly face-to-face, some hybrid – it’s clear that no one approach has won a majority of adherents.  We really shouldn’t speak of campuses opening up, heading online, etc. without qualifying such statements with “the fraction of colleges and universities doing so.”

One such operational strategy requires testing students and at times others on campus for infections.  It seems that this is another approach taken only by a fraction of institutions.  Again, the data is bad, but “more than 2 out of 3 colleges with in-person classes either have no clear testing plan or are testing only students who are at risk,” according to NPR.

Of colleges with in-person classes and more than 5,000 undergraduates, only 25% are conducting mass screening or random “surveillance” testing of students. Only 6% are routinely testing all of their students. Most, instead, are relying on only diagnostic testing of symptomatic students, which many experts say comes too late to control outbreaks and understates the true number of cases.

Another such operational strategy is what I called “the toggle term,” when a college or university switches between online (all or mostly) and in-person (all or mostly) education in mid-semester.  I forecast the strategy back in April. When I last blogged about it I had found seventeen Toggle Term cases this fall.

New examples include:

• Keuka College, whose infected numbers overwhelmed their care so badly that they sent all apparently healthy students home.
• The University of Chicago’s School of Business switched online as student cases spiked following a big off-campus party.
• Scott Community College Belmont Campus moved online for a week after staff cases rose.
• Three North Carolina universities that started fall term in person, then switched online, announced they would start spring semester in person.

Meanwhile, 1,000 Kutztown University students toggled themselves, as it were, leaving campus to study remotely on their own volition.

We could also approach the question by looking at individual stories.  For example, SUNY Oneonta has suffered a serious COVID-19 surge.  Their president has stepped down as a result.  Hazmat-equipped authorities (local? state?) have removed students and student property from campus.

There are many, many stories.

But overall, we run smack into one key problem: we are experiencing a serious data void as we try to see what COVID is doing to higher education.

III. WHAT’S NEXT?

What does the preceding suggest about the next year?  What does fall 2020 tell us about spring, summer, and fall 2021?

We should expect infections and deaths to continue growing.  There is no sign of the virus suddenly and massively mutating into a benign form.  I’m not seeing any evidence that a working vaccine exists, much less working through the long, arduous route of testing->production->distribution->enough people actually taking the thing to matter over the next few months, if not longer. Therefore COVID seems likely to continue cutting a swathe through the human race.  That necessitates not only hospitalizations, suffering, long-term injuries, and deaths, but also emotional tolls taken on families and communities, stresses on already strained medical and public health care, and continued economic recession. The unevenness of public health and medical care’s availability could worsen an already bitter national mood, even helping accelerate civil instability, especially as a potentially chaotic election occurs.

All of those damages hit academia, from infections and long-haul injuries to more deaths.  All of the attending effects also play across higher ed on multiple levels: enrollment, finance, educational operations, building renovations, mental health, etc.  To pick one example, the pandemic’s enormous stress might drive some students to reduce the number of classes they take, or simply to withdraw altogether.  To pick another, we could expect COVID-related research to surge, as it already has, while non-epidemic research declines.

Additionally, academia plays some role in spreading the pandemic, to the extent that we do our work in person and fail to rigorously follow sufficient public health measures.  At least one study finds campuses conducting face-to-face activities to increase infection rates in surrounding counties by a statistically significant measure.  This will take some toll on town-gown relations, not to mention academia’s broader reputation.

The global nature of the pandemic, and America’s international standing thereof, have hit international study hard.  We should expect a continued drop in the number of overseas students taking classes.  This has financial and campus cultural effects, of course.

How will higher ed respond? If we follow fall 2020 practices, colleges and universities will adopt a variety of plans, with no one system being used by a majority.  i.e., some campuses will teach entirely online, others all face-to-face, some blending the two, and so on.  We could expect around forty toggle term instances, if my fall 2020 count holds up.

Now, many campuses changed their fall schedule to end in-person classes early, typically by Thanksgiving break.  On the calendrical flip side, some could also start spring term later.  For example, Bowdoin College will commence classes several weeks late.  There are other cases as well.  One effect is a much longer winter break, lasting one to two months.  Historically this is interesting, as that winter gap starts to resemble summer sessions in size.  Perhaps we’re heading to a four season structure for American colleges and universities: fall classes on, winter off, spring on, summer off. Alternatively, schools can offer fully online winter programs.

Not present in the preceding, but present in how I imagine many readers react as they work through this post, is growing pandemic fatigue.  The virus has been attacking the world for nearly one year.  Many are tired of coping with it.  This is one driver behind lax compliance with public health measures. We may also be normalizing the thing, weaving it into the quiddity of daily and national life, so that we cease to single it out for attention, but gradually include it within the battery of threats we all face.  It’s possible that such acculturation and normalization will involve our no longer thinking about new habits, from masking up to expecting more open social spaces than we once did.  Already I, an energetic extrovert, flinch at the sight of other people in the same building as myself.  It might take extra effort to identify COVID effects in 2021, or even to draw attention to it.

One last note: we still badly need good data about what COVID-19 is doing to higher education.  We can’t assess this problem on anything other than a case by case basic without it.  The lack hurts our decision-making.  History will struggle to understand what happened in 2020, and will not look kindly at our fumbling to record it.

(thanks to Laurie Garrett, Eric Feigl-Ding, this Inside Higher Ed roundup, this bigger IHE roundup, this Chronicle resource, my old college friend Sheldon Robertson, and others)