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study.com
PBS Education
How COVID-19 has made some colleges question the academic calendar
Jun 25, 2020
You won’t know it from their mostly empty campuses, but colleges and universities will be bustling this summer.
With millions of Americans unemployed or reluctant to travel or
socialize because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and even though most
courses will be online, summer registrations at colleges nationwide
appear to be booming.
At Ozarks Technical Community College in Missouri, for example, 3,907
students have signed up for online courses, a number 67 percent higher
than it was last summer, said Hal Higdon, chancellor of the six-campus
system.
It’s more than just another pandemic-related blip, said Higdon; it’s a
wake-up call to the rest of higher education that schools should stop
shutting down in the summer, a tradition that dates to a time when
students had to go home to help on the farm, and that he said persists
because of inertia.
Limits on what most institutions offer in the summer result from
“laziness and lack of leadership,” Higdon said. “We’re still tied to an
agrarian calendar that goes back to the 1700s.”
Many of the students who are taking summer courses at Ozarks and other
community colleges are already enrolled at four-year universities that
offer few or no credit-bearing classes in the summer, and to which they
are expected to return, officials said.
The pandemic appears to be accelerating a trend that was already under
way. Compared to students who entered four-year colleges and
universities in 2008 and switched to two-year institutions at some
point in their college careers, those who entered in 2011 were
significantly more likely to make that switch only in the summer. Of
the students entering in 2011, nearly 150,000 had taken summer courses
at community colleges during the subsequent six years, according to the
National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
The practice, known as “summer swirl,” improves graduation rates, the
center found. That’s because taking courses in the summers lets
students rack up credits, save money and speed up degree attainment.
Those benefits may be propelling this summer’s surge at two- and
four-year colleges. Nearly 77,000 students — a 17 percent increase over
last summer — enrolled in online summer classes at the City University
of New York through June 1. William Carey University in Mississippi has
blown past its previous summer enrollment record, with the largest
gains in its education and nursing programs, the school said.
At Central Louisiana Technical Community College, summer enrollment is
up nearly 14 percent, even though the school has had to suspend new
enrollment in its popular prison and welding programs, college
officials said. The University of La Verne in Southern California
doubled summer enrollment among traditional undergraduates this year,
the school said.
The pandemic has been “a time of learning lessons” for colleges, said
Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of Complete College America, which
works to improve college graduation rates.
Among those lessons is that summer school gets people their degrees in less time, at a lower cost.
“Hopefully institutions will see that summer enrollment is a
lever for student success,” said Spiva. “Each term the institution is
open should be considered essential to student success.”
Changes in college student demographics have also led to increased
demand for summer classes. Today, fewer students are the traditional
18- to 24-year-olds who cherish summer vacations or internships;
they’re older adults with families and jobs who don’t understand why
the educations they need come to a halt in late April and don’t resume
until the end of August.
But universities say there are several barriers in the way of offering
classes in the summer. They often pay less to teach them, for example,
making full-time professors reluctant to take them on. This hasn’t
stopped several colleges from hastily adding credit-bearing courses
this summer for their newly admitted students, who administrators worry
might not show up for the fall term.
For Eden Schweitzer, a 17-year-old student at Ozarks who graduated high
school early and started college this year, taking classes this summer
was a no-brainer. With her focus squarely on getting into the college’s
competitive dental hygienist program, Schweitzer is taking both anatomy
and math.
“I wake up early and start my course,” she said. “I won’t do anything else until I get my course done.”
The University of La Verne has discounted summer tuition for continuing
students and is offering a free course about COVID-19 for incoming
freshmen. The school expects about 100 students to take the class, said
Mary Aguayo, vice president of strategic enrollment management.
Queens College in New York City has been almost overwhelmed by the
summer demand, said Daniel Weinstein, interim dean of the School of
Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Part of the City University system,
Queens has hit 10-year highs in the number of students in its summer
online computer science, nutrition and biology courses, Weinstein said.
“I have opinions, but we don’t really know why this is happening,” he
said. “Probably a lot of students who were nervous about coming to
campus jumped on this.”
Like many public colleges, Queens and the rest of the CUNY system
expect to be hit hard by budget cuts stemming from the
pandemic-devastated economy. The crisis has led most schools to rethink
how they do business, both during the summer and otherwise, said Peter
Eckel, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate
School of Education.
Colleges and universities should be using the opportunity to think about why they haven’t offered more summer classes, he said.
“The pandemic has raised a lot of questions about long-held traditions
about how to deliver higher education,” Eckel said. “The academic
calendar is one of them.”
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