If you have an anxious college student wondering what the Fall holds, you're not alone:
"our vision for the fall is that we have as many students on campus as we can safely accommodate"
Dr. Julie Sullivan is President of the University of St. Thomas, the state's largest private university. She says they'll be following guidelines that will likely dictate less density in the dorms, and a combination of classroom and virtual instruction:
"It may be if you had a class of 40 students maybe 20 would attend in-person on Tuesday and the other 20 would attend in-person on Thursday. Clearly the in-person element of it is going to have to be in conformity with our distancing requirements in our classroom capacity."
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Sullivan says the virtual component they're working on includes online courses that would either be synchronized to the live classroom or unsynchronized, where students would attend the same course online at a different time. She says that the University has actually been planning for this type of instruction for a while, and is spending the summer fine-tuning it for the best, most authentic student experience possible.
"We're really asking our facility to think about what are the distinctive characteristics of this class that we need to capture and what are those characteristics of St. Thomas that we want to continue to get infused into this classroom."
And regardless of the university setting, nearly all schools have received pushback on students having to pay full tuition during this time when in-classroom instruction everywhere has come to a halt, and students have been forced to move back home and finish the school year virtually. Sullivan sees it differently:
"You are not paying for three credit hours per se. You're paying for a degree from a particular university and all the things that come with that. And all the things that come with that include the particular faculty, their attention to you, their personal relationships with you, the way they become a lifelong mentor to you, the alumni network, the recognition in your employer community of the value of that degree. And so you can't get too caught up on what's the price for these three credit hours. You've got to think about the degree more holistically."
Sullivan says a big part of UST's plan also has to do with implementing COVID-19 testing and contract tracing come fall. A task force is working with the state Office of Higher Education to get a plan in place.
