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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're number one. We're number one in COVID cases. The United States has more cases and more deaths than anywhere else in the world still. But that didn't stop a whole lot of colleges and universities from bringing students back to campus for the fall semester, which means if you cover colleges and universities for a living like Andy Thomason does for the Chronicle of Higher Education, it's been a gnarly few weeks.
--:-- Andy Thomason: Yeah, well, it's a lot. Near the University of North Georgia, this is how students celebrated the first weekend back. A different packed party in Stillwater, Oklahoma, as officials at Oklahoma State University reveal 23 COVID cases at an off-campus sorority house.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The universities that decided to operate in person this fall amidst the pandemic are seeing cases rise on their campus and trying to manage that. This is where students here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison get taken when they test positive for COVID-19. to isolation housing. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out.
--:-- Andy Thomason: You've seen several thousand positive cases at the University of Alabama. You've seen hundreds of cases at the University of Wisconsin, thousands at Illinois State University, University of Iowa, Iowa State University. Some campuses are even causing their surrounding county to become a coronavirus hotspot, and that's really concerning, especially after a summer in which colleges spent the time planning and strategizing for how to avoid this exact fate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's all part of a reality some students say they assumed would come with back to school. Obviously, I don't want to have COVID, but it seems kind of inevitable. Let's start back in March when the whole thing begins. What do college universities do when it's becoming clear that we'll need to start socially distancing, quarantining, and states start locking stuff down?
--:-- Andy Thomason: So in early March, colleges turned their operations online in a near-unanimous wave. By the end of March, pretty much every college that had an in-person element had sent everybody home, turned all their learning online. And very quickly after, everybody started looking forward and trying to figure out, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to do learning amidst a pandemic?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there was this moment in the late spring and early summer where the signal kind of came down from prominent universities that not only will they be able to open for the fall, but they must open for the fall. And I mean, literally, that was the headline of an op-ed by Brown University's president, the New York Times. She basically argued that in-person instruction was a financial necessity for both campuses and local economies and also critical for students, especially low-income students.
--:-- Andy Thomason: And we saw similar messages from people like the president of Notre Dame, who invoked Aristotle, and Purdue's Mitch Daniels, who said, you know, the lives of students and faculty would be permanently damaged if the fall happened online. So we got this kind of bat signal from some of the big names in American higher education leadership sort of arguing, you know, just a month into the pandemic, really, that we've got to do this. We've got to bring things back to some form of normalcy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it sounds like there's lots of philosophical arguments for bringing students back. But is it pretty clear that this is about money? A lot of it is about money. There's no doubt about it. So let's look at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And that's a public, which at some point announced that they were going to be primarily online for the fall. What they projected was a $168.6 million loss from the operating budget.
--:-- Andy Thomason: Private universities who are operating all online are obviously also hurting. So George Washington University's president just last week said that the assumption that the university would be operating all online for this whole academic year basically means that they've got a $100 million chunk of revenue in housing that's just totally lost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think, and for some students out there, it's hard to sympathize with these massive organizations that charge, in some cases, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year for tuition. Don't they have endowments and, you know, hefty savings accounts for rainy days like these? Or are those insufficient for the monsoons that universities are facing, perhaps?
--:-- Andy Thomason: Yeah, they do have endowments. Now, what a university administrator would tell you is that an endowment is not a big pool of money that we can just dive into and come up holding big chunks of cash that we can throw in to balance the housing budget, right? These are funds of money that some donor gave and earmarked for some specific purpose.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But obviously the optics are not great when a university with a multi-million dollar endowment is saying we need to furlough people. we need to lay off people. So I can understand the way it looks to students or people who are skeptical on the outside.
--:-- Andy Thomason: And this is why so many universities make the decision over the summer to come back This is one reason Yeah There were a couple of other factors two beyond just the financial One was political We have especially public universities operating in red states. Some were more or less forced to devise in-person reopening plans. In North Carolina and Georgia, the state public university systems basically mandated that public universities there reopen in person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When schools say they're coming back and students are, you know, sitting at home talking this out with their parents, with their classmates, what exactly is the promise that universities, colleges are making to students about safety precautions when they come back?
--:-- Andy Thomason: When colleges released their fall plans, one of the things that they signaled to students was, we know this is what you want. We know that this is what we can deliver to you is this in-person experience. We want to bring you back. And so in their plans, they may have spelled out testing protocols, quarantine space, isolation space, all the kinds of things that you would expect.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it all came with one big caveat, which is, yes, we want to bring you back. We're going to bring you back. But we recognize that any attempt at planning a fall semester in a pandemic is a little tenuous and we might have to readjust.
--:-- Andy Thomason: So what happens when these schools finally decide to come back? So let's look at an example. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was one of the first big colleges to begin returning students to campus, and this was in early August.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, it's been a busy day here at UNC at Chapel Hill, where students have been moving in the dorms all day long. Now, while some students still have some concerns about moving back in, for the most part, students here tell me they feel safe coming back.
--:-- Andy Thomason: So they moved students in. They had their first day of classes. Everything seemed to be going fine. But a couple of days after the first day of classes, the university all of a sudden starts to report clusters of coronavirus cases in university housing, in off-campus housing and in Greek houses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So quickly, these clusters start to add up and UNC didn't do any reentry testing of students. It didn't have any surveillance testing to speak of. So they were basically just doing symptomatic testing. If you start feeling sick, come to campus health, get tested, figure out if you have coronavirus.
--:-- Andy Thomason: And what you see is, you know, a portrait of uncontrollable spread on a college campus such that a week after they had their first day of classes, they had to shut down because they just couldn't keep a handle on the spread anymore, or couldn't at all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's very heartbreaking that I have to move out after less than like a week of actual college experience and less than a week of classes. It's very heartbreaking.
--:-- Andy Thomason: What we saw there and at NC State University just down the road is that campuses with strategies like that, that didn't do surveillance testing, that didn't require negative tests for students to come back, were really seemingly underprepared for the risk that coronavirus posed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How were they underprepared, though? I mean, how could they not come back with the safest plans possible? I mean, I think a lot of people might be confused that they thought they could just have students come back and that there wouldn't be outbreaks.
--:-- Andy Thomason: I'm confused, too, to be honest, because one of the things that scientists and public health experts were saying over the summer is that you need stuff like surveillance testing. You need as vigorous and as rigorous a testing operation as you can get.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, in the university's defense, I guess, they have not gotten clear guidance from the government, the federal government, by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the CDC explicitly did not recommend asymptomatic testing for all students on campuses because they said it could give campuses a quote unquote false sense of security.
--:-- Andy Thomason: Now, public health experts looked at that or some did and really felt that that was really, really risky. And it pretty much guarantees you're going to have a fair number of positive cases on your campus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there any college campus, university campus that, you know, gives you hope in all this? Is there one that sort of stands out that did this better than everyone else and made the right decisions the first time around?
--:-- Andy Thomason: So there is one university that has pulled out all the stops and gotten some press for it. That's the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After the break on Today Explained, I'll talk to the Chancellor of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Robert J. Jones, you are the chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana and our friend Andy Thomason just told us that your institution did a better job than most at handling the return to campus during this pandemic. Tell me why did he say that?
--:-- Robert J. Jones: I believe you may have said that because once we navigated our way through moving to remote we immediately began to think about what was going to be necessary in order to bring our students back to campus in the fall.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it became very, very clear that the testing protocols that were available at the time would not allow us to do rigorous testing in a way that was affordable and scalable.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: So our provost contacted Dr. Marty Burke, who is the associate dean of our medical school, as well as a renowned chemist. They pulled their labs with more than 100 people to start to aggressively working to create what we believe is one of the most innovative tests in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that is a saliva-based test that's fast, it's scalable, it's affordable, and it allows us to test all of our faculty, staff, and students twice a week.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: So it's been an amazing diagnostic tool, surveillance tool, and the way that one of our team members put it, most other folks' tests allows them to see the tip of the iceberg. Our testing allows us to see the entire iceberg, and that's a game changer, we believe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right. Well, that's really impressive. I want to hear more about the game changing. Before we go there, tell me just for people who aren't familiar with your school, who maybe live abroad, what's the size of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign?
--:-- Robert J. Jones: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and believe it or not, notwithstanding COVID, we have a higher number of students than we had last year. We have over 52,000 students, about 18,000 or so faculty and staff. We're the largest university in the state of Illinois and one of the major research universities in the country and in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I always joke and say you can't throw a stone down any major street in Silicon Valley and not hit several alums of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: What's the sticker price tuition for an incoming student within the United States?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, there's resident and non-resident students for the United States. So roughly it's about $30,000, $32,000 a year. And for non-resident students, it could be a bit more than that, depending upon whether you're in engineering or one of the liberal arts and sciences.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: Okay, so consistent with what we talked about with Andy, there's a lot of money on the line here for this institution, for students as well. Was not bringing students back on the table at any point?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course it was on the table. But we fundamentally believe that that's the best model of education. And we heard from our students recurringly. They wanted to be back on campus. They didn't want to spend the whole academic year studying from their parents' basement or from their old rooms back home.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: They wanted to be able to reclaim as much as a traditional college experience as possible. Were you hearing from students who also said, you know, we're really concerned about coming back and we'd rather stay virtual, stay online?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They had that option. We provided the option for students to choose. We made it very, very clear to students. We put all of our classes with more than 50 students are all online. We have about 9,500 people who are taking this semester online. That's about almost a quarter of our over enrollment.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: But yet, it's important to note that about 60% of that 9,500 still decided to come back and be in an apartment of being a dorm room to be able to capture some of that experience. So we didn't force anyone to come back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so with that on the table, with students and professors having an option to come back or stay remote, what's the plan for those who want to come back as you head into the new academic year?
--:-- Robert J. Jones: The plan, if you came back, we had a requirement that when students checked in for the fall semester, the first thing they had to do was go to one of our 17 to 20 test sites and get tested. That was an absolute requirement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We made it clear that wearing a face covering was a requirement. The social distancing was going to be a requirement. We encouraged them to wash their hands and to avoid large gathering. All of that was laid out.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: And so we've been very, very clear, very transparent about what our expectations are. And we made it clear that you have to test twice per week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We work closely with the mayors of Urbana and Champaign, Mayor Finan and Mayor Marlon. They work with the restaurants and bar owners to put restrictions on the drinking age. We moved to outside dining before the students got here, as well as put significant fines in place for gatherings that went above the limits that the city has set for those that live outside of the university.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: And so all of that restrictions that was in partnership with the city. I mean, we worked seamlessly with the Vanna-Champaign and Savoy and the surrounding communities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like you're heading into this new academic year in late August with as much precaution as you can possibly take. How many cases do you have in the first week with students back on campus?
--:-- Robert J. Jones: I think it was a couple of hundred. I can't remember the exact detail, but it went up from double digits to triple digits. I have 800. Is that correct?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Actually, at that first week, yeah, it probably did go at the end of the first week because of all the partying. Yes, it went up to over 800.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: And that was by far beyond any of the models that you would have predicted, 800 cases?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, the models originally predicted if people would have adhered to what we asked them to do, the model that predicted we would have no more than about 700 cases the entire semester.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: We knew that was going to be a spike when students returned. We knew that students were gonna want to engage in party. We had modeled the expected number of parties and people engaged in those parties. We had modeled it all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How many parties did you expect?
--:-- Robert J. Jones: Oh we expected hundreds of people to go to parties but there were a few bad actors that threatened to put all of this hard work at jeopardy by doing things that we really didn't include in the model which was that if you tested positive you were told Urbana Public Health Department would be notifying you to let you know that you have a positive test and to immediately let you know what you needed to do to go into isolation and quarantine
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We did not anticipate that folks would not answer the phone. They wouldn't return the calls after they tested positive. And we certainly didn't anticipate that individual would be so careless about the concern and health of others.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: I guess the question I have for you then is, I mean, so the reason there was this big discrepancy between your scientific modeling and all of the precautions you guys took and your expectations and the reality is because at the end of the day, you're dealing with college kids. And when you put them all together, they're going to get together, which I guess isn't very scientific. That's just maybe common sense.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of people might have said the responsible thing to do might have been to not let these kids get together in the first place.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: I would respond to that by saying all that there's a counter argument that with the level of testing that we're doing, we still have the lowest positivity rate than any of our peers across this country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, and we believe because of our testing protocol and because of the behavior of the majority of students, our campus is probably still one of the safest places to be. Rather than being back home and in your community where you don't have the rigorous testing, you don't have the restriction placed on social distancing, and you don't have all the protocols we have in place.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: But people are staying at home. Aren't they like I'm in a closet right now? Aren't they keeping to themselves? Aren't they maybe having a much smaller bubble with their families, with their closest friends?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Evidence is counter to that.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: How many times do you watch TV and you find on holidays, hundreds and thousands of people out partying and in bars and on beaches?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so your counter argument to what you just stated is that young people left to themselves without a lot of structure in place will do exactly what you're talking about. And we've at least provided a kind of micro environment where those kinds of things are frowned upon, not only about administration, but the vast majority of the student body.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: And so I reject the notion that the students would have been safer if we'd left them at home, because at this juncture, we have seen no spread in the classroom from students to faculty or faculty to students.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our laboratory environment has been back open and operating since June. Zero spread within the laboratory settings, which is a critical part of our mission.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: So, Chancellor, if you were going to do this over again, if you were going to bring kids back in late August just a few weeks ago over again, would you do it exactly the same or would you have done something differently?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I have to say this is one of the most innovative approaches, and I think people have different perspectives about what success looks like. But I can tell you, other than possibility of being or adding something that we really didn't think was going to happen, that people intentionally violating quarantine and isolation order, that's the only thing we could have done better.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: And at the same time, if it were not for our testing capability, the fact that we can test at scale, the fact that we can see the entire iceberg, we've been able to respond in a timely fashion, unlike some of our peers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now those positivity rates, the number of positive cases per day is back down to 20, you know, 30. Still, we want it lower than that. We want it very, very low because we've got a long way to go between now and June for graduation. And we think we can do it because our students have demonstrated in the last 13 days. They will respond when you treat them with respect.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: And I could not be more pleased not only with my innovative faculty, but I have some of the most amazing students in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chancellor Jones, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
--:-- Robert J. Jones: My great pleasure. Best of luck to you. And as a friend of mine said to me, I asked him, how was he doing? He said, I'm staying positive and testing negative. I wish you the same, my friend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I like that. All right, appreciate it. All right, take care.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chancellor Robert J. Jones from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, a school that seems to be doing a half-decent job of implementing smart guidelines and groundbreaking testing, but still ended up with hundreds of cases of COVID.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Keep in mind that, unfortunately, a lot of American universities and colleges are reopening without the really smart guidelines, without the groundbreaking testing. But, at least as my report cards used to say when I was still in school, there's room for improvement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. The team includes Will Reed, Halima Shah, Amina Al-Sadi, Muj Zaydi, Jillian Weinberger, and Noam Hassenfeld, who contributes original music.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Afim Shapiro is our engineer. Golda Arthur is our supervising producer. Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts. Extra help this week from Byrd Pinkerton and Cecilia Lay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lots of music this week from the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.
