Community Colleges Likeliest to Stay Virtual – Inside Higher Ed
As most four-year colleges continue to announce intentions to reopen campuses in the fall, many community colleges have said they will remain (mostly) virtual.
Arizona State University. The University of Arkansas system. The University System of Georgia.
As spring stretches into summer, colleges keep announcing their plans to resume in-person instruction in the fall. But a few trends stick out.
Many of the institutions planning to return in the fall are four-year colleges and universities, especially those that are private. The institutions planning to stick with virtual instruction are predominantly two-year public colleges.
Several factors are influencing leaders’ decision making for the fall semester. While they vary from college to individual college, wider trends exist in each sector.
“As we got to looking at the fall semester, it was really a science and math problem,” said Joe May, president of the Dallas County Community College District.
May and other leaders of the district faced problems with scaling public health safety interventions. The college serves 162,000 students each year. When leaders looked at screening 40,000 students per day for symptoms of COVID-19, May said, they realized it wasn’t a feasible task.