In the spring, as U.S. COVID-19 cases grew into the hundreds, a wave of universities transitioned to online classes and sent students home. Over the summer, students were left wondering how their universities would respond to growing uncertainty about the spread of COVID-19. The question on everyone’s mind was, “What do we do next?”
For many schools, the answer was “re-open” — but success wasn’t universal. Back in August, the student positivity rate at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reached 14 percent and the university closed its doors.
As the fall semester draws to a close, it’s become clearer which universities have had success in protecting their students from outbreaks on campus. Across broad categories — testing, social distancing, masking, communications, and culture — schools’ reopening strategies differ as widely as their case numbers. Analyzing ten schools, selected from the 100 most highly ranked colleges and universities in the United States, we’ve broken down what worked and what didn’t.
Every university we looked at has an on-campus site offering free tests and requires testing for students with COVID-19 symptoms. Most schools use a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, test, which is considered the gold standard for SARS-CoV-2 detection, and every university promises test results within 48 hours to their students.
Some schools go beyond this standard and require testing for everyone, regardless of whether they have symptoms. Broadly speaking, our sample of 10 schools falls into two categories: those testing their populations at least once a week and those using only random sampling for asymptomatic students.
Northeastern has the most robust testing plan of the group, testing each student once every three days. Northeastern is followed closely by Yale, which tests their students twice weekly, while NYU and the Stevens Institute both test their students once weekly. From the schools who randomly sample their populations for testing, there is a significant lack of transparency on how students were chosen, making comparison of plans difficult.
Overall, more frequent testing is associated with a lower rate of infection. In schools where students are tested at least once weekly, the average number of cases as a proportion of the student population was 0.81 percent, measured two months after the semester’s start. Schools that relied only on some form of random testing process for asymptomatic students had an average of 4.39 percent. Overall, universities that test their students using random sampling methods had a higher average percentage of COVID-19 cases, while universities that test all students at least once a week had a lower average percentage.
While some schools publicize specific enforcement guidelines and punishment structures, others resort to vague “expectations” and assertions that administrators are confident their communities will “step up,” or, in Northeastern’s case,“protect the pack.”
Every school analyzed both requires students to wear masks on campus and maintain at least six feet of space between each other at all times. In fact, almost every school either mirrors or exceeds their corresponding state’s guidelines, with the sole exception of Syracuse University,where the state’s guidelines are much stronger than the norm.
However, significant differences in enforcement undercut this vigilance. Certain schools, like Northeastern and Syracuse have enforced interim or full suspensions against students who have violated COVID-19 guidelines, acting swiftly and strictly. However, the overwhelming majority of schools either do not enforce guidelines effectively at all or enforce in a non-confrontational manner - hiring, appointing, or conscripting student representatives to remind other students on campus to follow the rules.
Students report fraternity parties at Texas A&M and University of Utah with 80 to 90 unmasked people in one room. Students at Notre Dame complain of COVID-19 enforcement hotline calls going unanswered, inconsistent exposure notifications for professors and significant deficiencies in care for those in isolation or quarantine.
Enforcement varies within student populations as well. A fourth-year computer engineering major at the Stevens Institute of Technology said the university’s strict enforcement of COVID-19 policies largely only covers its on-campus community, as students living directly off campus aren’t required to undergo university testing and aren’t monitored closely.
“I hear music from parties [from the off-campus building next door] very often,” said the student, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. “I know one of my friends who lives in that building…. his roommate is a freshman and brings all his freshman friends over because … they're not allowed to have parties on campus.”
Ginger Ooi, a senior at NYU with a double major in journalism and chemistry, pointed out that some gaps in enforcement might actually stem from error. After the university gave her a false positive COVID-19 test result, she was treated as if she had COVID-19 antibodies once she was out of quarantine despite never having contracted the virus. She said the university stopped requiring her to undergo routine testing. Ooi also said she was startled by the lack of communication to her contacts when she received the positive test result.
“I submitted my test on Tuesday, so when I got the results back I immediately thought, ‘Well, [explexitive], I had in-person class on Monday,’” Ooi said. The information she gave NYU’s contact tracer seemed to go nowhere, though; neither her professor nor the other students were contacted by the university. “The Monday after, I attended online, and everyone was like, ‘Wait, Ginger, why are you online?’”
The decision to enforce guidelines is independent of the size of school. Large universities often cite difficulties enforcing policy due to size, but the data clearly shows enforcement can be done regardless of size. New York University, one of the largest in the nation, enforces its policies consistently and aggressively.
This matters - there is a clear relationship between the strictness of enforcement and the percentage of positive tests. Trend analysis clearly shows that the stricter schools are, the healthier their students.
Over the summer, students anxiously waited for the email that would detail the fate of their fall, hanging housing plans and travel preparations on their university’s every word. With so many things unknown and so many different outcomes, strong communication was an important factor in keeping students informed and prepared for the fall semester. Once the semester began, it was imperative for universities to respond to concerning events on campus as well as remind students of the guidelines they were expected to follow.
There was a wide variety in the frequency of posts by universities on everything from reopening strategies, to general news on the virus, to specific campus policies. The number of news releases seemed to have little impact on the number of cases on campus. Universities with a lot of research activity posted many articles with leading research about the novel coronavirus itself and its impacts, which is valuable information, but not necessarily relevant to campus reopening.
Two universities we studied, Northeastern and Notre Dame, used social media campaigns to promote COVID-19-mindful behaviors on campus. Northeastern’s #ProtectThePackNU campaign emphasizes the role each student has on campus in limiting the spread of the virus. Northeastern University social media accounts post updates with the hashtag and the university’s campus is decorated with the slogan. Notre Dame’s “HERE” campaign has a similar goal of introducing people to what is going on “here” at Notre Dame University. Students at these universities are reminded of COVID-19 practices and mindsets whenever they engage with their school’s social media.
Most universities posted updates and held Q&A sessions prior to the start of the semester to inform and reassure students, faculty, and family members of the safety measures on campuses. Further into the semester, communication like this waned, especially in a university’s general news, as guidelines became ubiquitous and more particular concerns had to be addressed, like an unsafe gathering or a spike in tests. Schools also began to emphasize the need for students to act with caution when traveling for the holidays.
Variations in wider school culture also had little correlation with case counts at schools. Students at schools with very low case counts — Stevens Institute of Technology, for example, with only 6 cases at the two-month mark, and the University of Virginia, with 97 cases — both participate in Greek life at relatively high rates compared to other schools. Any influence on case count by the proportion of students who live off-campus at each school is similarly tenuous.
The population of the city and surrounding area of a university is an important factor to put COVID-19 on campuses into context. A little over half of universities had a percentage of cases similar (less than 1 percent difference) to the percentage of cases that occurred in the same time period in their respective counties, however Baylor University, University of Notre Dame, University of Virginia, and New York University, had significantly higher percentages of cases on campus compared to the surrounding area. This does not clearly show the reason that those universities would have higher rates of cases on campus, but it does show that when universities do not contain cases on campus they can skyrocket beyond the rate of the surrounding area.
Our comparisons represent a variety of issues facing universities and students united by a single common factor: lack of information. Universities are enacting policies with no hard evidence of efficacy. Students are making decisions without accurate knowledge of the situation at their universities — one of the most common problems we encountered was a lack of transparency. Standardization of data, up-to-date and open publication of testing results and the status of cases on campus, and willingness to allow facts to inform policy are all in short supply. Though causal conclusions are difficult to draw, it appears as though schools that strictly enforce policies and test asymptomatic students regularly have been more successful in keeping students healthy.
More than 300,000 students have contracted the virus since the initial outbreak. Unless evidence-based action becomes the norm, that number will continue to grow. Here are the latest updates from our ten sample universities:
Note: Editor’s Note: The conclusions in this story were shaped by the availability of data. Schools were inconsistent in the types of data they reported and were often opaque about policies. No school using random sampling as a testing strategy, for example, was clear about how samples were chosen; for this reason, we chose to compare schools across broad categories of testing strategy rather than by testing frequency. In the future, analyses of schools’ effectiveness would be well served by transparent, standardized COVID-19 reporting.
