Some say "the ship has sailed"

We've been asked recently by several chancellors and other leaders of academic institutions how to use our Covid19 database and dashboards to help them with the crucial decision that they face: "How do we decide the criteria for the re-opening of our school?"

I can and do tell them: "Well, we can show you the background, history, current status and trend-lines for your county in terms of Covid incidence and prevalence, and thus total exposure for the students, their parents, the faculty, staff, and the administration, plus of course the concerned local business people and the community at large."    

It is harder to do by specific locale--e.g. to their own town, hospitalization rates, age and gender and ethnic composition of cases and deaths to date, which stores are open or closed, and which depend mostly on the college students for income, etc.   But there are ways to get this information mostly from the local health department,  and those can have bearing on the question.    

The AnywhereAnytime folk (developers of Covid Dashboard  https://anywhereanytime.io/covid19/ ) held a session on these topics last week.  They invited me, and it went something like this:

1. What criteria will matter mostly?    The four obvious ones: Health, Learning, Economy, Legal.

2. Who cares?   Students, parents, faculty, staff and administration, leadership (including the Board), community, and separately, the business owners and staffs who are dependent on the school students.

You could do a spreadsheet with cells for each criteria for each group, and get a long laundry list of issues on the table pretty quickly, but our conclusion was that it boils down quickly to three points:

A. Human Life and Long Term Health of our students, faculty, and staff is PARAMOUNT.  This is very different and much more deadly and long-term injurious than any flu since the 1918/19 pandemic.

B. The economic impact to the university itself is huge, as well as to the businesses nearby.   The challenges are immense, especially for colleges without large endowments, dependent on tuition money.

C. The impact on the Learning Experience is key--after all, THIS is our mission.  How can you learn, without cohorts, without labs, without the admixture of collegial sutdents....

Note that we must make tradeoffs among these three points in order to re-open, and whatever answer is selected is necessarily a compromise.    We just don't know enough about Covid to properly assess risks.

What we DO KNOW, is that we are increasingly confident that we KNOW HOW TO CONTROL the spread of the Virus, but we also KNOW with a high degree of certainty THAT THE STUDENTS WILL NOT FOLLOW THE RULES.   Ample evidence has been displayed in the past couple of weeks that should curl the hair for any chancellor who still has hair.

Well, that sort of "ices the cake", so to speak.   If the students will not play by the rules, then the school cannot safely re-open until something dramatic happens, like a vaccine becomes widely available.

WHAT, THEN, CAN WE DO?

Our answer was to outline 3 phases:

1. EMBRACE ON-LINE LEARNING until a vaccine is available and utilized widely

2. WHEN CRITICAL MASS of immunity is achieved, bring students and faculty back on a volunteer basis

3. WHEN Covid19 cases/deaths diminish to the level of annual flu's, re-open with a mixed model with students making the choices.

The trick is WHAT DO WE DO NOW?   in PHASE 1?

And the answer is not easy, but it is doable with four steps:

A. Dramatically improve on-line learning.   After all, if our mission is education, we should be able to learn ourselves or conduct research on how to do this.   Businesses are having to do it; so must the universities and colleges.  There are plenty of great examples--model them, improve on them, build gamifying into them....

B. Provide incentives for students to continue their education (don't let them all take a 'gap' year), with tuition breaks, low-cost loans, more counseling attention, etc.

C. Provide incentives for professors to learn 'on-line' skills, and to design courses better for on-line

D. Cut costs dramatically--shutter facilities, provide early retirement packages, lay off staff

THE REALITY, we felt, is that this is a STRUCTURAL CHANGE, not a temporary or cycical issue.   This is a Blockbuster vs. NetFlix moment, an inflection point for the university and college scene as we have known it.   It will never be as it was.   Businesses face this periodically, and some don't make it, while others emerge stronger and new forms win.    

Those wishing for "normal times to return" are doomed.   The ship has sailed.