Omicron and higher education: a tale of two nations in January 2022

In December the Omicron COVID-19 strain was rapidly rising. Colleges and universities had to plan for the upcoming month. How should they react?

In that same December I and some friends started tracking those plans with an eye towards those moving most or all classes online, which I’ve previously dubbed “a toggle term.” Our open and collective spreadsheet ran continuously, with people adding data and updating its accounts. Today I’d like to summarize what we learned by looking at how two national higher education systems, those in Canada and the United States, responded.

One caveat: our data is provisional. We’re going on what people volunteered online. No institution backed this effort nor contributed their research. The spreadsheet probably missed some cases. The data below are conservative, most likely underestimates.

Today, nearly at the end of January, it looks like roughly 160 colleges and universities in North America moved classes online for part or all of that month. About 40 of those campuses are in Canada, while around 120 in the United States. I don’t know if any Mexican campuses followed suit; no data hit the sheet.

You can see some geographic differences at play. Note, for example, the relative lack of campuses online in the American southeast and upper midwest/high plains areas.

For Canada, that’s 40 campuses out of around 436 total, or circa 10% of the nation’s higher education institutions. (source)…