In this episode, Phil Hill, Jeanette Wiseman, and Kevin Kelly discuss multiple campus and system plans for Fall 2020, with many schools going public with reopening (hybrid) or staying online announcements over the past week.

Hosts:

* Phil Hill* Jeanette Wiseman* Kevin Kelly

Transcription:

Phil: Welcome back to COVID Transitions. I’m Phil Hill and I’m here with Jeanette Wiseman and Kevin Kelly for another week of discussions about higher education and the changes we’re going through. This week, somewhat of a follow up to our discussion last week. Last week, we noted that now that Cal State University, with its four hundred and eighty thousand students, announced it was going to be mostly online for fall 2020. We were expecting to hear quite a few announcements coming forward, that you’d get a lot more, as Kevin was describing, if somebody is out on the dance floor now, other people can get out there. Indeed, we are starting to see quite a bit of news coming out. So we wanted to cover what’s happening with the news and what the changes are. It’s certainly been an exciting week from what I’ve seen, news wise, if you can call this type of information exciting.

Jeanette: Well, lordy, momma there’s not very much consistency. It doesn’t seem like, that’s for sure. With all that’s expense.

Phil: That’s part of the excitement. A lot of these you couldn’t have predicted or certainly I couldn’t have predicted the way they went. Let’s run through some of the news and just get your thoughts on what’s actually happening. So last week, we covered with California that there were some preliminary news about the University of California system, much more definitive news from Cal State system and then the California budget. Well, there are two things that have happened this week. First of all, the California community college system. Kevin, describe what you saw there and what do we know about why they’re actually making the decision they’re making?

Kevin: Well, I know originally the chancellor had said that it was still going to be up to the colleges in one of those Wednesday webinars that they hold to discuss COVID circumstances. They had basically set it up as such. But I think in the meantime, it’s been a little bit more guidance to have more virtual.

Phil: Yeah, I think we’ve seen a lot of the campuses already coming out saying that they were going to be virtual for fall 2020. Then the chancellor came out on Monday and essentially said he was endorsing the decision that most colleges were going to be virtual. That’s a way I had seen the news represented. I found it interesting that part of the rationale was simply finances. We’re community colleges, we recognize we probably can’t afford some of the mitigation requirements that we expect to see if we were going to try to open the in-person classes. Just the ability to afford plexiglass and social distancing and testing and all the changes seem to be a major factor there.

Jeanette: I also think, though, from a community college standpoint, strategically it makes sense. I think that not only California, but beyond being able, community college has two things going for it. It’s usually commuter plays. There’s not a lot of community colleges that have a big resident population.

It’s a place where it would be easy to go online. Then additionally and I think we saw some of the news reports this week that also talked about this that students aren’t sure what they’re going to do next year.