It is back to school season for college students too, but as with many things during a pandemic, it may not really feel like it.
"Don't bring any work back to your bedroom, that's always been my mentality," said Isabel Peters of Sag Harbor, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now, unable to work in libraries or coffee shops as she used to, she must commit to working at the desk in her room.
Ms. Peters will get her degree in community and environmental sociology and will also earn certificates in global health and environmental studies in the spring. While she thinks she might hold off on the master's degree another year, hoping for a time of comparative academic normalcy, she was adamant about not putting off her senior year. "I worked this hard. I'm so close to being done," she said.
Not far from Madison, outside of Chicago, Lily Feinberg of Amagansett is in her junior year at Northwestern University, but it was tempting to stay at home with her family.
"I felt like it was so weird talking to my friends in quarantine because unlike them, I really liked it," she said, laughing. "I was just home with my parents and my dogs, watching movies and playing board games, cooking big dinners. I do think by the end, a lot of my friends started to feel the same, like, 'I can't leave my family!' "
After so many months of constant family time, "coming back was harder than it's ever been because I was loving being home," she said. Ms. Feinberg swiftly adapted to the change, aided by the sense that she is "supposed to be doing this" as she works toward a theater and history major.
On Aug. 28, Northwestern informed families of students that not only would freshman and sophomores not be allowed in dorms for the fall semester, but all of their classes would be remote.
Ms. Feinberg sees the potential to recreate some of the coziness of home doing online school and living with two friends in an apartment, which has a roof garden that makes socializing a little less daunting. Until winter in Illinois.
When asked about the practicality of college romance in the time of corona, Ms. Feinberg contemplated the fact that "so many times people hook up at a party and then hanging out happens once that happens." But with parties now carrying serious repercussions, she said that some friends already back in Evanston had noticed instead "people going on walks together before they were able to hook up!"
In New York, after large parties at the State University at Oneonta, over 100 people tested positive for the virus and the campus was closed to instruction for two weeks on Sunday.
A "SWAT team" of contact tracers and case investigators was deployed to the campus to contain the cluster. "If clusters of positive cases emerge on particular areas of a campus while still below 5 percent or under 100 students, but strain the college's ability to isolate and contact-trace, the college must return to 100 percent distance learning with limited on-campus activity," state guidelines advise. By Thursday, there were over 500 cases at SUNY Oneonta and in-person classes were canceled for the semester.
On Sunday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called college campuses "the canary in the coal mine," pointing to more than two dozen across the country with over 250 cases of Covid-19 as of last weekend. "Colleges very much show what happens when you bring back a concentration of people. Even with all the precautions. Even with everything we know, because you still run into human behavior."
Most colleges are aiming for "hybrid classes" split online and in person -- in reality, mostly online and a few in person. At the University of Iowa, where Jack Motz of Southampton is a junior, 18 percent of classes were scheduled to be online, though there was a "sick out" a few days ago in which students and faculty called in sick to get the administration to consider switching to a fully online model.
"It's obviously not ideal, but learning how to manage expectations is just a part of life," said Mr. Motz. The history major said he's trying to make the most of it and that living off campus helps. "Quarantine in dorms has sounded so Orwellian," he said.
Mental health was a key deciding factor in James Fairchild's return to Northeastern University in Boston this fall. A college sophomore from Bridgehampton, he said that a six-month internship during his undergraduate time was a central and very appealing hallmark of his university, but to his dismay it is exactly that kind of real-world experience that Covid compromises.
"We're looking into paying so much for a lesser experience," Mr. Fairchild said. "Many schools are upwards of $80,000 to $90,000 a year, competing against each other with indoor hockey rinks and Jacuzzis for rankings, and now we don't have access to that. Is it worth it?"
Mr. Fairchild and others and others said it seemed to them that a lack of finalized plans indicates schools want to make sure they get their money before families are even more turned off by the idea of college during Covid.
Taking online courses as an international student has seemed to present a whole other slew of questions for both student and college. What is a study visa if it's not being used physically in the country where the university is located?
Though Mr. Fairchild is not faced with this conundrum, living in an apartment on campus with four housemates is equally mystifying. What if, "They kick us out and they take our tuition?" he wondered. "I mean that is a very likely possibility. I think the theme is uncertainty and uneasiness."