Tracking Coronavirus Cases at U.S. Colleges and Universities

31%

Since end of 2020

Coronavirus cases have continued to emerge by the tens of thousands this year at colleges, a New York Times survey has found, after students returned to campuses at a time when case numbers were soaring across much of the country.

More than 120,000 cases have been linked to American colleges and universities since Jan. 1, and more than 530,000 cases have been reported since the beginning of the pandemic. The Times has also identified more than 100 deaths involving college students and employees. The vast majority occurred in 2020 and involved employees.

Nearly a year after most universities abruptly shifted classes online and sent students home, the virus continues to upend American higher education. When many campuses reopened in the fall, outbreaks raced through dorms and infected thousands of students and employees.

Since students returned for the spring term, increased testing, social distancing rules and an improving national outlook have helped curb the spread on some campuses. At Ohio State, where the test positivity rate once peaked at about 5 percent, university officials reported a positivity rate of just 0.5 percent across 30,000 tests on campus in one recent week.

Still, major outbreaks continue. The Times surveyed more than 1,900 colleges and universities for coronavirus information and found at least 17 colleges have already reported more than 1,000 cases in 2021. At the University of Michigan, a highly infectious variant turned up on campus. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where more cases have been identified in 2021 than during the fall term, in-person classes are resuming after a difficult start to the year.

Despite surges at some colleges, there are positive signs. In counties with large populations of college students, coronavirus cases have been falling, mirroring a national trend in declining cases.

With no national tracking system, and statewide data available only sporadically, colleges have been making their own rules for how to tally infections. While The Times’s survey is believed to be the most comprehensive account available, it is also an undercount.

Many universities, hoping to quickly identify cases and prevent broader outbreaks, have tested aggressively for the virus, detecting cases in some instances that might otherwise have been missed.

Among the colleges contacted by The Times, most have published case information online or responded to requests for case numbers. The Times has obtained case data through open records requests at several public universities that would not otherwise provide numbers. Most colleges do not publicly report coronavirus-related deaths.

Given the disparities in size, reopening plans and transparency among universities, this data should not be used to make campus-to-campus comparisons. Some colleges subtract cases from their tallies once people recover. Some report only tests performed on campus. Some did not separate 2020 case data from 2021 case data. And some initially provided some data but then stopped. The calculation of growth rates for 2021 is in some cases skewed by the incomplete data colleges provide.

The Times is counting reported cases among university students and employees in all fields, including those whose roles as doctors, nurses, pharmacists or medical students put them at higher risk of contracting the virus. Some universities have a broad range of programs, including medical units, and have reported dozens of cases tied to health care. Those cases are listed above as a subset of their universitywide totals.

Some universities did not provide data for cases at their medical schools, hospitals or clinics. Some included those cases in their campuswide counts but did not specify how many there were. Other universities that are primarily focused on medical training, or that reported small numbers of cases tied to clinical programs, are listed in the main table on this page with an asterisk.