Across the country, college campuses have become ghost towns. Students and professors are hunkered down inside, teaching and learning online. University administrators are tabulating the financial costs of the Covid-19 pandemic, which already exceed the CARES Act’s support for higher education.
The toll of this pandemic is high and will continue to rise. But another crisis looms for students, higher education and the economy if colleges and universities cannot reopen their campuses in the fall.
Right now, the likeliest scenarios for the fall semester are yet another semester of totally online classes or a mixture of small face-to-face classes and large lectures online or offered in a hybrid mode. Either way, the traditional college experience -- intercollegiate athletics, fraternity and sorority life, and much else -- will be missing.
Without the traditional campus experience, much of colleges’ appeal will be lost -- with profound economic consequences, especially for most private colleges and many regional public comprehensives.
In a desperate bid to find treatments for people sickened by the coronavirus, doctors and drug companies have launched more than 100 human experiments in the United States, investigating experimental drugs, a decades-old malaria medicine and cutting-edge therapies that have worked for other conditions such as HIV and rheumatoid arthritis.
David Beasley, director of the United Nations World Food Program, warned Tuesday that the world is on "the brink of a hunger pandemic" as it grapples with the global coronavirus crisis. He said that without action, the world could face "multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months."
We are already facing "a perfect storm" due to wars like those in Syria and Yemen and more frequent natural disasters, among other factors, he said.
Colleges across the country are trying to decide whether they can reopen campus for the fall, and how long they can put off a final decision.
Schools are mapping out different scenarios, depending on the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic in the fall. Boston University, for example, has said that if the virus is still raging, it may not return to face-to-face instruction until January 2021. Another scenario projects some students on campus in the fall, and others taking classes remotely.
First responders have been vitally important in responding to the coronavirus crisis, but few Americans would put colleges and universities on the list of those institutions vital to the nation’s response. A review of the facts tells a different story.
Every weekday morning, Siân Lewis calls her brother on FaceTime and spends an hour doing yoga, stationed on the porch outside her apartment on the campus of Davidson College.
It is normally a prime place to see classmates crisscross campus. Now, it is just Ms. Lewis and the birds.
More than 90% of the 1,761 students who usually live on campus at Davidson in Davidson, N.C., have departed. The school, like almost all others around the country, sent students home last month in an effort to minimize their exposure to the coronavirus that has swept the globe.
California’s crushing five-year drought came to a welcome end after record rain three winters ago. Or did it?
Although forests are greener, reservoirs are fuller and widespread water restrictions are gone, many believe the past few years, in which there was pretty decent rainfall, were just a blip on a troubling long-term skid into drier times.
In the border town of Tijuana, factories are working full tilt to pump out masks, protective gear and ventilator parts as global demand surges because of the coronavirus. And yet, locals say hospitals are desperately short of it all.
Mexico is the eighth-largest supplier of medical devices in the world, but much of it is shipped abroad. International trade rules, an aggressive scramble by wealthier nations to stock up and what critics call a lack of planning on Mexico’s part have drained the nation’s health system of supplies it will need to fight the pandemic.
ACE continues to provide timely webinars and resources for the higher education community on COVID-19 through the ACE Engage® online learning platform.
Coming up, join ACE’s Philip Rogers and Rick Staisloff, principal of the rpkGROUP on Wednesday, April 1, for a discussion of “Weathering the Financial Storm of COVID-19.” The webinar will be followed by several breakout sessions designed to set the stage for ongoing collaboration on Engage's Budgeting and Finance group to develop solutions over the coming months. Log in or sign up for Engage to register for the webinar.