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Looking ahead to COVID-19’s third year: what it may mean for higher education
As I was finishing this post two pandemic stories unrelated to higher education hit my various feeds about the same time. One was from a finance reporter, who proclaimed his delight in going to many social gatherings, from indoor restaurants to sports events, and determined that Americans were “over COVID.” “[P]eople are weighing the risks, but seem to be erring on the side of enjoying life’s creature comforts.” Another was a CNN report on how three states (New York, Maine, New Hampshire) are calling out the national guard to keep COVID-overwhelmed hospitals and clinics from breaking down. Taken together the two articles offered a little snapshot of how divided are American responses to the pandemic.
Today’s post is about how that pandemic’s third year may play out in the world of higher education. It builds on a previous post about trying to imagine that year three in general. It also relies on when I first wrote about how higher education might exist in the pandemic’s third year, way back in September 2020.
Several problems occur when building such a future vision. As I said in that previous post, it’s hard to forecast when the viral situation is so fluid. Omicron could outcompete Delta, or fail to do so. Omicron could be more transmissible than its predecessors, spreading rapidly…
