Sydney Fairbairn lives only six minutes from the University of Denver, where she’ll begin her freshman year in the fall, taking a mix of in-person and online courses.
Fairbairn has a congenital heart defect, meaning if she caught the Covid-19, she’d most likely need to be hospitalized. While she’s taking extra precautions, she sees moving into the dorms and trying to live a “new normal” as a rite of passage she doesn’t want to miss out on because of Covid-19. So she’s moving in.
“You either ignore the obstacles or let them get you down,” she said. “If you let them get you down, you won’t progress as a person.”
While Fairbairn doesn’t leave the house without a mask, washes her hands frequently, and doesn’t plan to attend large parties, she knows that won’t be the case for many of her peers in the fall. “I see a lot of people my age not taking it very seriously,” she said. “I don’t really have that choice.”
Personally, I can just see it going downhill really fast. I don’t want to move there and then be sent back home.
For Fairbairn, moving into a residence hall is the better of two bad options. For many students at residential campuses, deciding where to live and how to learn involves fraught navigation, in which one question looms large: How seriously will their peers take Covid-19?
Ariyah Armstrong couldn’t wait to move to Arizona to attend the University of Arizona. She looked forward to attending football and basketball games and meeting friends in her dorm.
But as Covid-19 cases continued to increase around the country, particularly in her home state of California, she didn’t feel safe moving to Arizona and worried the university would quickly move classes online if an outbreak occurred.
“It’s just too much of a risk, and personally, I can just see it going downhill really fast. I don’t want to move there and then be sent back home,” she said.
While the University of Arizona planned for most of its classes to be in person, students can opt out and request online classes, which Armstrong did. These options are common around the country at colleges that are offering primarily in-person classes.
Ayan Gupta did something similar. He planned to attend the University of Washington and live in dorms but commute home to see his parents on the weekends.
All of his classes were moved online, and while Gupta says some of his peers are still moving to Seattle to live near campus, he sees the risks of bringing Covid-19 back to his family as too grave.
“It didn’t make sense to go to campus, come home on the weekends, and bring the virus back,” he said. So he plans to live at home, at least this fall.
Jean Chin, chair of the American College Health Association’s Covid-19 task force,
said the risk of students bringing the coronavirus to or from campus would be low if “all parties are doing everything perfectly.”
That would require everyone on campus to wear masks while on campus, off campus, and when visiting others; practice social-distancing; and to avoid large gatherings, which Chin says is unlikely. Large parties in college towns have already made headlines and spooked residents. At East Carolina University, the police shut down a gathering of almost 400 people, The News & Observer reported.
Family dynamics make the risk of transmission from student to parent particularly worrisome, Chin said. “In a household, most people don’t see their household buddies as vectors,” she said. “If it’s your child that comes home from campus, they’re probably not going to be wearing a mask or staying six feet away from you.”
Universities are putting extensive measures into place to try to minimize the spread of Covid-19, such as limiting who can enter campus, requiring masks, and mandating or offering different levels of testing.
Terri Rebmann, a professor of epidemiology at Saint Louis University, said these measures, if followed, will be “incredibly effective,” but the challenge for universities will be what students do off campus.
“It really is about taking personal responsibility for your own choices and recognizing that what you do can have a very large impact on a college campus,” she said.
Annie Xu planned to attend the University of Washington in person, but as she watched Covid-19 cases grow around the country and her peers ignore social-distancing guidelines, she changed her mind.
“I don’t know if I can trust the majority of students to be safe,” Xu said, explaining that she’d seen “a lot of people on social media” sharing photos of themselves at parties or other high-risk activities.
Armstrong, thet Arizona student, said she’d seen future students making plans on social media to attend parties or joking about not wearing masks. “There will be parties, people will be gathering,” she said. “There will be people taking it seriously, but there will be other people who will ruin it for everyone else.”
Rebmann said universities will have to make the message of personal responsibility clear to students. “Even if your average college student isn’t high risk, they could put someone else’s life at risk, and we try to spread that message to students that you have to look out for your community,” she said.
Chin said she “wants to believe” students will follow safety protocols, but also wants to be “realistic.”`
“There are going to be lapses, and we’re going to have to just constantly educate them in a gentle, friendly, positive way. And get their student body leaders to help, get their pals, their role models, to all buy in,” she said. “That’s the only way we’re going to succeed.”
Others have criticized colleges for going ahead with in-person plans this fall, knowing full well the likelihood of viral spread. “Relying on the self-control of young adults, rather than deploying the public-health infrastructure needed to control a disease that spreads easily among people who live, eat, study, and socialize together, is not a safe reopening strategy,” write Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard Medical, School and Jessica Gold, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis, in an Atlantic article entitled, “Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students.” The article continues, “And yelling at students for their dangerous behavior won’t help either.”
While some students have accepted the reality of online classes, others are still seeking a semblance of the in-person experience and willing to move into dorms, even at the risk of infection.
Ryan LaCivita felt he “needed to get out” of his rural Massachusetts town, and moving to Burlington to attend the University of Vermont felt like the perfect opportunity to do that, even if all of his classes would be online.
“I’ve been looking forward to college as an experience where I can begin to make my life what I want it to be,” he said, “and that starts with getting out of my house and living away, even if it’s different.”
LaCivita, who plans to study music education, sees the 2020 fall semester as a “temporary normal,” and while he may not be able to socialize with others, he sees the opportunity to be on his own as a worthwhile trade-off for the lack of socializing and safety risks.
“I think the joy and excitement that I’ll be feeling of living away from my house will probably outweigh the negativity that I’ll be feeling from online classes,” he said.
Abigail Smith feels the same way. A self-proclaimed “lifelong Aggie,” Smith grew up wanting to attend Texas A&M to study biomedical science. Though all of her classes are online, she thinks being around other students in the dorms will help her focus on learning.
“It will be nice to be around people and have some normalcy instead of being stuck at home for six months trying to learn biology online,” she said.
