Faculty and staff of universities are in an in-between time – in anticipation of a fall return to full operations of the university. Residence halls are slated to be fully-occupied. Most courses are designed to be in-person. Events on campus have a green light.
Most of these changes were triggered by the demonstrated success of the available vaccines to radically reduce the symptoms of COVID-19 and thus to reduce the spread of the disease in heavily vaccinated populations. That evidence then led to the ubiquitous policy in universities to mandate vaccines for their populations (with medical and religious accommodations as legally required).
This line of thinking addresses the physical health issues, but the evidence is overwhelming that mental health impairments are much more prevalent in the adolescent and adult populations in 2021 than in 2019. The pandemic, with its demands for stay-at-home behavior for many and front-line viral exposures for others, had its bad consequences.
Hence, faculty and staff at Georgetown are deeply interested in how best to support the residential students as they return to campus.
Georgetown had one recent intervention from which we are attempting to learn as much as possible, the Summer Hilltop Immersion Program or SHIP. We’ve posed some questions:
- We didn’t know whether students would have taken advantage of vaccination opportunities without the mandates that we have introduced for fall.
We estimate that over 85% of the SHIP students arrived in early June already vaccinated. We supplied vaccines to the remainder. That bolsters optimism for the fall vaccination prevalence among students.
- We didn’t know whether the isolated learning experiences that most of the class of 2024 and transfer students had experience would result in student conduct issues when the SHIP came together.
Reports from Student Affairs suggest that lower than expected conduct issues were observed.
- We were very interested in the students’ reaction to the social and academic experiences. Was SHIP a positive intervention for these students?
We conducted (through CNDLS and OADS) surveys of the SHIP students both before and after the experience. The results were gratifying. A series of questions asked about engagement both socially and in class, feeling part of the community, satisfaction with academic performance, feeling support from faculty, and feeling a member of the class of 2024.
At the beginning of SHIP the strongest positive feelings among those above were for a sense of belonging at Georgetown, a confidence of meeting academic challenges, and membership in the class. Those three remain strong at the end of SHIP.
The real improvements during SHIP were centered on self-perceived engagement in classes, the ability to pay attention and focus in class, and the opportunities to engage with peers outside of class. SHIP greatly increased positive self-assessments in these domains.
Of course, we would like to use these data to speculate on ingredients of the fall return to campus by students who have been remote learners for over a year.
One of the last questions asked was “What is most on your mind as you prepare for the Fall 2021 semester?” The Word Cloud below gives us a sense of how important the SHIP students focus on the campus life as an undergraduate taking in-person classes. Words like “balance” (often in the context of academics and social), “friends,” “people,” and others reinforce the positive effects of a residential college for undergraduates.
Clearly, there are “half-full” and “half-empty” views of the survey results. The half-full is that bringing undergraduates back together is a positive experience for their sense of self and identity. Together, they increase their motivation for engagement in classes; they are enriched by their social interactions.
The half-empty is this is information from a rather blunt instrument, a self-report survey, which might overlook real problems among those who did not come to SHIP or did not respond to the survey; hence, the fall will challenge all of us with a return of a population who will find it difficult to reengage in-person. Risk mitigation suggests preparing for the half-empty and hoping for the half-full.
I am very proud of faculty and staff who are now designing for the half-empty interpretation, using enhanced capacities to support students they learned during full remote learning, and I know they all hope that the half-full interpretation will be more accurate for our fall experience.
I don’t think you’ve quite captured the “half empty” interpretation. Granted, the word cloud is a pretty silly way to get a handle on this, but to me it signifies that the most prominent features of the educational experience–by far–are the “campus,” the “classes,” and the “friends,” “people, and “hope” that go along with them in any “balanced” “life.” Those things are more important than perennial “worries” about “majors” or “schedules” (which I suppose we can treat as control variables here) or “Covid.” In other words, precisely because the university’s response has lacked “balance,” you have deliberately denied students essential elements of the education Georgetown used to offer. The “half-empty” interpretation here is that you are guilty of a massive failure of courage and a massive breach of trust, not only with your students but with a very long and distinguished educational tradition. I can only imagine what St. Ignatius would say about your timidity.
I am not denying that the virus was a threat to the well-being of some in the community. But it was not the only threat, and it didn’t stop cops from hitting the streets, didn’t stop nurses or doctors from showing up in hospitals, didn’t stop supermarket employees from working the checkout aisles, and didn’t stop factory workers from continuing to produce the toilet paper, toothbrushes, and other manufactured goods that we all needed to keep going. Those people persevered, despite the virus, because they all understood that life had to go on. They pulled up their big-boy pants and got the job done. By contrast, the university wet the bed. Evidently, you don’t think education is as important as toilet paper or toothbrushes. Okay. Noted.
Strong.
Well done !
I don’t think you’ve quite captured the “half empty” interpretation. Granted, the word cloud is a pretty silly way to get a handle on this, but to me it signifies that the most prominent features of the educational experience–by far–are the “campus,” the “classes,” and the “friends,” “people, and “hope” that go along with them in any “balanced” “life.” Those things are more important than perennial “worries” about “majors” or “schedules” (which I suppose we can treat as control variables here) or “Covid.” In other words, precisely because the university’s response has lacked “balance,” you have deliberately denied students essential elements of the education Georgetown used to offer. The “half-empty” interpretation here is that you are guilty of a massive failure of courage and a massive breach of trust, not only with your students but with a very long and distinguished educational tradition. I can only imagine what St. Ignatius would say about your timidity.
I am not denying that the virus was a threat to the well-being of some in the community. But it was not the only threat, and it didn’t stop cops from hitting the streets, didn’t stop nurses or doctors from showing up in hospitals, didn’t stop supermarket employees from working the checkout aisles, and didn’t stop factory workers from continuing to produce the toilet paper, toothbrushes, and other manufactured goods that we all needed to keep going. Those people persevered, despite the virus, because they all understood that life had to go on. They pulled up their big-boy pants and got the job done. By contrast, the university wet the bed. Evidently, you don’t think education is as important as toilet paper or toothbrushes. Okay. Noted.
I am so happy to hear that the program was helpful to our students and very grateful to those who made it happen (and who carried out the assessment). One quick note: there were a lot of fears about mental health consequences of the pandemic; however, studies do not support the conclusion that mental health worsened across the board (see this report by the Lancet Task Force: https://psyarxiv.com/zw93g/). It did worsen in particular pockets of population (e.g., people with young kids) and we should be attentive to that, but the primary pattern across studies is that of resilience.