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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. There's always a cultural peer pressure at any college to drink, to party, to break the rules, but this year, you know where I'm going. With COVID in the mix, the stakes of peer pressure have risen to astronomical levels that border on the absurd. Going to that party doesn't just mean you could lose a few hours of study time. This year, it could mean that you contribute to an outbreak of deadly infections, possibly get sick yourself, and even get suspended for the whole semester without a tuition refund. Only a few weeks into the fall semester now, in cases are spiking at colleges all over the country.

More than 150 colleges have reported at least 100 cases each over the course of the pandemic. Some cases well into the thousands, some colleges I should say well into the thousands. From testing to contact tracing to quarantine measures, there is no set of unified procedures on how to contain the virus on college campuses and very little guidance from the federal government. What else is new? Here with me now to go over how colleges are handling the pandemic, we'll take your calls and you'll help us report this story is Douglas Lederman, editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed. Doug, welcome to WNYC today.

Doug Lederman: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian: I'll just say before we open the phones, it's getting hard to keep up with a number of cases and different approaches at college. I'm going to throw a few out there for our listeners who may not have a kid in school and be obsessing about this would be in school yourself. I'm reading every day, like at Georgia College and State University, 10% of students have COVID-19. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, that number is 20%. At the University of Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus, more than 1,800 students have tested positive, causing a pause in all in-person learning. As someone who's been covering higher education for a long time, what's it been like this semester?

Doug: It's unprecedented, obviously, like everything else going on in our lives these days. It's very hard to keep up with because it's extremely diffuse, there are roughly 3,000 colleges in tons of different contexts, rural, urban, and small. As you said, there is no commonality and that is problematic in certain ways. It's a core underpinning of higher education. Every college deserve largely a free agent. Obviously, you have [inaudible 00:02:53] New York and up in ways out front in terms of providing state guidance in about how colleges handle this, including just this week, some expanded guidance from Governor Cuomo.

You've got government states where nobody's touching it and where it's largely left up to individual institutions.

Brian: Listeners, college students, professors, staff, parents, how is the first semester of college going so far this fall? 646-435-72-80, tell us your COVID stories or COVID prevention stories or COVID response stories, who thinks you have a best-case or a worst-case practice to share, 646-435-72-80. As we go over some of these wildly disparate approaches that are taking place around the country with Doug Lederman, co-founder of Inside Higher Ed, 646-435-72-80, or you can tweet a short story or a question @BrianLehrer. Let me ask you about testing procedures which are all over the place from what I've read.

One really interesting and maybe ominous story comes from the University of Illinois, the big one at Urbana-Champaign. They had been conducting 80,000 tests a week, I read, that's two tests a week for each student. It's seemingly the most rigorous and comprehensive testing plan in the country, and there was still an outbreak. What happened?

Doug: The diffusion again is incredibly hard to understand. If you got to think, Illinois probably has a total of maybe 50,000 or 60,000 people. Given what we know about COVID,

the people pick it up. The part of the problem what we're seeing is at the big places, this is almost impossible to control. The only place where I think you can really make it work is if you can truly control the flow of people on and off the campus. You can't do that on a campus that is basically a city within a city or within towns. Unless you keep people from flowing on and off campus, there's no way that you can limit.

Illinois, you're right, is exceptional. There are places that are not testing people unless they show symptoms still. Illinois is an outlier on the positive front in terms of testing. I think it just shows that even places that are doing some of the things that you want to see institutions do and abide by good practice. Remember CDC never recommended that colleges test all students. Even [inaudible 00:06:05] some of the confusion comes in and some of the problems.

Brian: Let's take a phone call from Carissa in Huntington whose son is a freshman at a SUNY school. Carissa, you're on WNYC, thanks for calling in.

Carissa: Thank you for having me. My son is a freshman at SUNY Geneseo. The kids, they had to be tested within two days of entering campus and have a negative test, so before they even came on campus. Of course, there is just like your guest is talking about their contacts because some students do have to have contact with other people, but the kids are being held accountable. You can't enter someone else's dorm room or you'll be written up. You can't walk in large groups. The kids are sticking to it because they want to stay. They see what happened at Oneonta. They want to be in school, they want to have this experience.

Brian: You're telling me that the kids are sticking to it because I think one of the premises, even of this conversation is, you can't stop an 18-year-old for being an 18-year-old or you can't stop enough of them. You're saying that your son's school, so far they are.

Carissa: They are, and the thing is they are adults. You can't stop adults from doing what they want to do either. We can see that. They have a vested interest in it is what I'm saying. They are being held accountable and they are following through with their actions. I'm really proud of them. I really think it's great.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Glad to hear an encouraging story. By contrast to that, last week, NYU staff and faculty signed a letter to the school expressing their concern over how the school has reopened, saying the school lack PPE, lack transport transparency. Here's the contrast with the caller, overly relied on peer policing as a way to keep infections down. The letter asked for more public health measures like routine testing to reduce the role of policing. If we're to learn anything from Carissa's call and then learn anything from Urbana-Champaign and then learn anything from this frustration at NYU, Doug, what is it?

Doug: Well, context is everything. I actually just was looking up while the caller was talking. Geneseo, there are plenty of-- Right now, we have more colleges than not that are persevering to keeping some, if not, many students on campus. There are places that are "making it work," but I think you have to look beneath the surface. As near as I can tell, in Geneseo, which is what the caller was talking about, has only tested, I believe, it's website says 57 students, so it isn't, near as I can tell, doing regular testing. Everything is context. Some of the places with really big numbers are testing.

As we've heard our presidents discuss, the more testing you do, it's likely that the more cases you're going to find. I do think that the questions you need to ask and that's where what Governor Cuomo did is interesting, he said this week that he's requiring basically daily reporting on all sorts of things because I think we're seeing enormous variation in how much colleges are revealing and telling their constituents and the public about-- There still colleges that aren't reporting data regularly about COVID. Again, the main thing to learn is ask hard questions about the place you're interested in and make sure that you're getting good information.

Brian: Here's a student from Cornell, calling in from Ethica, Nick, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling.

Nick: Hey, Brian. I was just calling because I guess one, the transparency point, it seems like my school, the numbers are being updated on such a slow basis. You don't really know how accurate they are. The other thing is that they do self-testing here, so they give us the swab and we swab ourselves which also just feels like don't feel like a medical professional capable of like good testing.

Brian: What could they do?

Nick: I guess I would just like if they were more transparent, [unintelligible 00:10:42] for updating the-- Oh, not for me.

Brian: All right. Doug, did you want to get in on that? Nick, thank you for your call. Good luck on that.

Doug: No. I mean, that's fascinating. Yes, they will. That's where my daughter went, by the way. Again, two both good points. There are major colleges that are they're reporting once weekly. There are other places that are reporting every day and there's enormous variation and the dashboards that colleges are producing in terms of the self-testing. Most of the testing issue that you raised, Brian, is an important one. A testing is expensive, there are places that are doing a lot of it and not charging students. There are other places, the self-testing is fascinating. If you can't count on students to behave, to not social distance to counting on them to test accurately seems do that.

Brian: Here's my favorite story in this realm of all. From the Washington Post, the University of Arizona says it caught a dorm's COVID-19 outbreak before it started. Its secret weapon? Poop. The gist of this is that the university is regularly screening the sewage from each dorm, searching for traces of the virus. On Thursday, two weeks ago, officials said the technique worked and possibly prevented a sizeable outbreak on campus. When a wastewater sample from one dorm came back positive, the school quickly tested all 311 people who live and work there, and found two asymptomatic students who tested positive and they were quickly quarantine.

I guess that prevented the outbreak through sewage screening, thought you'd like to know. Camila in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. You're not that Camila, are you?

Kamala: No, I'm Kemala.

Brian: Oh, that's how Trump likes to say it.

Kemala: Yes. Mine is spelled with an E, not an A. Yes, I have a daughter, is in her second year. She's in school, out-of-state in Massachusetts, and her school has a very rigorous testing protocol. They had to onboard test all students, faculty staff have to test one to three times a week, and they have a daily dashboard. I just pulled up the dashboard. In the last seven days, there have been zero positive tests. Previously, there had been I think eight between when school started and now and they were able to immediately drop those students into isolation.

I feel like this is so important because I was okay with sending my daughter back to college because that was happening, whereas my younger child is a New York City high school student and I feel like she has to go remote because NYCDOE is doing nothing like this. In fact, schools' only been opened for a few days just for teachers. I think the statistic is there are 75,000 teachers, 15,000 of whom are remote. That means 60,000 should be tested, but only 15,000 teachers have been tested. That means 45,000 teachers were not tested. If at my kid's tiny school, college, they caught 8 out of 70,000 students.

Brian: Kemala, I'm going to leave it there for time, but it's another example of how good testing protocols really do make a difference, Doug. You can joke about the wastewater testing because of what it involves, but if that was really a screen for a group that discovered that there was some COVID in the dorm and then they found two asymptomatic kids who they could quarantine and prevent an outbreak from taking place before it started or the way they're testing, at Kemala's child's college which they're not doing in the high school, then success as possible.

Doug: Yes. Listen, we know what works. The medical professionals advice all through this has been personally washed your hands, et cetera, et cetera. From an institutional or government standpoint, it's testing, contact tracing, isolation, et cetera. The problem, there's no good choices here. I really feel for the families having to make decisions and actually, I feel some empathy for the institutions who are wrestling with a lot of difficult issues, including responding to what they heard from parents and students last spring.

I mean, there's many students and their parents wanted the kids back on campus and the institutions, a lot of them face, we have to be clear, financial incentives to have students back and function and the town's benefit. There are all sorts of why having students back on campus makes sense. It's only if done well. Again, right now, we're seeing many places continue to endeavor to keep students there, but we're seeing, one of the callers mentioned Oneonta, wishing them have to bail. I think it's a open question. How many institutions are make it through a fall?

We've actually started seeing some institutions announce that they're going to stay virtual through into the spring. We just had the first few places do that this week.

Brian: On the difference between institutions trying to go back and institutions going virtual, is it money? Because I've certainly heard and read that there are a lot of smaller colleges, especially around the country and ones that don't have big endowments, things like that, that are actually endangering endanger of financially collapsing unless they go back in person and give it a try for the enrollment that they'll get doing that as opposed to going virtual. It's a matter of financial life and death for a lot of colleges. It's not just a matter of culture, it's not just a matter of whatever else we might want to throw in there. This is about money.

If you want to look at what schools are going back and what schools are, how true is that?

Doug: It's a factor and I think to the extent to which it's a factor probably depends on whether you're a cynical journalist like me or I think money is a factor. It's a major factor in some cases. As I said, I do believe that the colleges were in large extent the lead and they were responding to what parents and students were demanding. Most of these places truly believe that education delivered in person is better. That's why they do what they do. I think it would be unfair to say it's all about money, but there's no question a lot of institutions make as much money or they certainly clear more money on housing and room and board and dining and all those other things, then they'd be one which they discount heavily.

There's no question there's a financial incentive and I think the students were telling colleges last spring that if they were virtual, the students wouldn't come back. What I don't think that captured though, there's no question that virtual learning that most provided last spring wasn't very good because a lot of it was done on the fly over a matter of a few days. I believe that the nature of the [unintelligible 00:19:04] we can ever measure quality and higher education of what students are getting this fall is better. At least, we have to be better. We know the expectations are going to be higher.

If the things we won't know for a long time, there's no question that the experience of students on campus this fall is drastically worse or at least different. I think it's going to be some time before we figure it out. Students were satisfied though.

Brian: Since we only have like 45 seconds left, not enough time for another call, let me just throw in a quick sports question. We've done the news. Now, we're going to do the sports, then we'll get to the weather. Football, it's so different from place to place. The big tent, I went to grad school at Ohio State. They are non-playing. I have family ties to the University of Miami. They had opening night last night.

Doug: Again, 100% and yes, much more so. Actually just today, there was more news out of actually out-of-state. The main reason, I would say, that the Big 10 and the Pack 10 which were the two major conferences of the five major conferences that decided not to play, the reason the Big 10 and the Pack 10 chose not to was I think out of concern for athlete's health. We just had a study out this morning that reaffirmed the potential heart damage.

Brian: Penn states has a third of the COVID cases on the football team have the [inaudible 00:20:48].

Doug: Listen, those data are going to be the same, whether you're in a mobile Alabama or [inaudible 00:20:55].

Brian: Doug Lederman, editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed. Thank you so much.

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