You Have Been Accepted To College For The Fall. Should You Go?

As an entering college freshman for the fall, you have many choices.  You can attend the college you had originally planned to attend. If it’s open and teaching in-person you can choose to go to campus. If it’s open and teaching online, you can choose to stay home and take those online classes. You can choose a different college that’s offering in-person classes closer to home. You can choose a different college to take your online classes at a lower cost. Or you can choose to simply wait it out and take the year off.  Each of these choices has different implications for your safety and that of your family and different costs.

If You Want To Attend College In-Person

Let’s begin with examining what the in-person experience is likely to look like. It will not be what you saw when you visited the campus in the fall or spring if you were fortunate enough to visit before the pandemic. It will not be like the pictures you see of college life in view books and on the web.

Schools are considering many alternative ways to keep students, faculty and staff virus-free and to open safely and in compliance with state rules. You will likely have your temperature taken every day and you may be tested weekly for the virus. You and your classmates will likely be wearing masks and you will be asked to keep your distance from others. Dining halls will no longer be the gathering places but rather “grab and go” with very few seats. You may be grabbing that food from one of the food trucks spread around campus. Commons spaces will be closed so that it will be very difficult to have informal gatherings. If there are sporting events, it is unlikely that spectators will be permitted. 

Only some of your classes will meet in person, even if your campus is open, as large classes are likely to be online. You may be seated in a classroom but your faculty member may be teaching from another location. Alternatively, classes which meet multiple times a week may be divided into sections with each section meeting in person just once a week and online for the other sessions. Classes are likely to be offered six or even seven days a week from early morning until into the evening in order to be able to spread people out and have enough larger classrooms.

Many schools will be unable to fit all their residential students in their residence halls with appropriate social distancing. Those schools are considering just inviting one or two classes of students back, e.g., freshmen and sophomores or freshmen and seniors, or bringing back those students who most need in-person classes such as theatre, engineering and other lab-intensive majors while inviting the rest of their students to live at home for the term or the year and take their classes online.

Some schools which are planning to open are also considering changing their calendar in an attempt to either be more flexible and/or to minimize the spread of the virus. Anticipating a spike in the of South incidence of the virus after Thanksgiving, some, including Notre Dame and the University Carolina are talking about opening in mid-August, cancelling the October break, ending by Thanksgiving and not having students return to campus until the new year.  Others, like Ithaca College, anticipate the incidence of the virus will have dissipated later in the fall and are considering  starting classes later than usual, in September or even in October. Still others such as Beloit are splitting their term into smaller blocks with only one or two courses in a block. Other schools are considering moving to a cohort model especially for freshmen where small groups of students are put together for all of their general education courses and you and your classmates may even stay in the same classroom and have the faculty come to you. 

You should also consider that depending on the progress of the disease, if you have gone away to college, you may find that you are not welcome at home if you want to go home for a weekend or even for Thanksgiving if you have been living in a residence hall.  Finally, you must be aware that if the incidence of the virus begins increasing again in the area where the college is located and shelter-in-place orders are again mandated or if it spikes on your campus as it did in nursing homes and on cruise ships, your college might have to move back to online learning with little notice.

If you want to attend college in person but no longer feel comfortable traveling far from home or living at college, there are many options available for you near home. Most students live within commuting distance of a wide array of colleges ranging from community colleges which have open admissions, low tuition and usually accept students until a few days before the start of the term, to both public and private four-year colleges. Almost all four-year schools still have space for commuter students and many are aggressively recruiting students in their area. According to the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC), more than 750 four-year schools still are accepting students and have financial aid available and not all schools report their information to NACAC.

If You Want To Attend College Online

What will your experience be if your college decides to operate online or you decide to go to an online institution in the fall? Most of you will continue living at home with your families while some of you may live in apartments with a few friends which will constitute your bubble. You will be able to go out and take advantage of socializing in your area based on the rules in the neighborhood. You will spend much of your time studying remotely. Should you be concerned as to the quality of your learning experience? 

While all of our in-person colleges and universities pivoted very quickly from in-person to online teaching in the spring, not surprisingly, many students were dissatisfied with their experience. Many faculty had never taught online before and many schools did not have sophisticated online tools. Many of those schools for whom online teaching is new that have made the decision to continue with being online in the fall are making significant investments in improving the online experience. Many schools are investing in faculty development, instructional designers, enhanced learning management systems and other things in order to move from “Zoom U” to a much more robust online experience. In addition, they are working on putting many of their support functions including advising, counseling, career services and other support areas online as well as their co-curricular experiences so you will be able to participate in clubs, honor societies, and e-sports as well as “hang out” in online cafes and chat rooms; much as you would on-campus. If your original school of choice was one of the ones for whom teaching online was a new experience, you should ask about student satisfaction from the spring and you should ask them what they are doing to improve and enhance their online campus.

If you decide that you will attend college online in the fall, you don’t have to go to the college that accepted you; there are many choices. You may choose look to another school because you are not persuaded that your first choice school will have a robust online campus or you are unwilling to pay the price of your original school. There are many schools that have been online for years and have fully developed online campuses at very reasonable tuition. These include Southern New Hampshire, University of Maryland Global Campus, American Public University System, Western Governor’s University along with many community colleges that have online offerings.  Both US News and World Report and Optimal have rankings of online colleges and degree programs which you may find helpful in choosing the online institution to attend.

Many of you may find that remote learning can be a very rewarding and academically satisfying experience and will work for you if you want to stay close to home and to control how much you interact with people as long as Covid-19 is still a major concern.

If You Take a Year Off

Finally, you may decide that you would prefer to sit out next year and wait in the hope that by the fall of 2021 college will be back to the one you saw on your college’s website and in its view books. What will you do with your gap year?

For many, the purpose of a gap year is to take a break either between high school and college, usually to work, get an internship and/or travel. Getting a job now, with unemployment rates over 14%, will be exceedingly difficult so that working is not likely to be possible for most of you. More than half the students who had internships planned for this summer have had their internships cancelled so the probability of negotiating an internship for next year will be low. Traveling will be difficult and may even be impossible in many places as the coronavirus will still be with us and many countries may still be closed to visitors. In addition, traveling will expose you to added risks of contracting the virus as you move farther and farther outside of your bubble.

If you are very self-motivated, you could design some interesting projects for yourself for example you might pursue a hobby that you have or you might also consider looking for fulfilling volunteer work. Ellen Ruppel Shell, a professor at Boston University, has suggested the CoronaCorps, similar to Americorps, a public service program for students. Poynters talks about internships that students could create for themselves in news writing and marketing to help small businesses get back on their feet. There also are abundant volunteer opportunities to work in food banks and other areas to help people in need. And between now and the beginning of November, you can get involved in our political process and work as a campaign volunteer in this election year.

If you are thinking of a gap year you should be aware that the data shows that delaying college can set you for many years to come, in part because it is less likely that you will ever attend college and because those who step out of college are less likely to complete college than if they had continued going full-time. On the other hand if you are able to find productive and enlightening ways to spend your time during your year off, your experience may increase your chances of being accepted at a better institution in 2021 and may increase your commitment to succeeding in getting your degree.

Decision Time

These are difficult decisions. Some of you have already paid your deposit at your first-choice school but may still be rethinking your decision and may choose to ask to take a year off. Some of you have not yet made your decision and many schools extended their deposit date from May 1 to June 1 but you may still not be ready to commit, it is likely that extensions will be granted. Many of you are waiting to see what the virus will do and what your family situation will be as you go through the summer. Beyond those schools which accept very few of their applicants, the most highly rated schools, most schools will have a place for you and will welcome your attendance come the beginning of the fall term.  Many of the schools with waiting lists have already gone to their wait lists more than once as students have hesitated to commit especially if it means attending a school which is far from home, which hasn’t announced how it will operate in the fall and which is expensive and may operate online; in addition, some of these schools have had many students who have requested gap years thus freeing up places for other students.

Disclosure: The author is on the Board of Trustees of American Public University System.