Students Reject Coronavirus Testing
Halfway through the semester, schools are reporting participation rates far below their goals, prompting at least one school to go so far as to offer prizes to students who volunteer to get a coronavirus test.
Texas colleges offer free coronavirus tests. Why aren't more students getting tested?
"Texas colleges offer free coronavirus tests. Why aren't more students getting tested?" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas colleges and universities spent the summer months bulking up their testing capacity to catch COVID-19 outbreaks fueled by students who are infected but don’t show symptoms.
The University of Texas at Austin said it could test up to 5,000 asymptomatic students, faculty and staff weekly. Texas A&M University trumpeted a similar goal of testing more than 5,000 students each week – about 7% of the student body. And the University of Texas at El Paso, with about 25,000 students, said it had the capacity to test up to 2,500 campus members weekly.
But halfway through the semester, schools are reporting participation rates far below their goals, prompting at least one school to go so far as to offer prizes to students who volunteer to get a coronavirus test.
UT-Austin, which has more than 50,000 students, has only required students to be tested before attending football games. During the first five weeks of the semester, the school had the capacity to test 25,000 community members but tested only 8,870 – an average of about 1,770 per week. That included the 1,198 students tested for the first home football game on Sept. 12.
“Why aren’t we testing 5,000 people per week? The answer, in part, is that we have fewer than 5,000 people a week who have been willing to take the tests,” reads a Sept. 28 memo from the UT-Austin Faculty Council.
Texas A&M conducted 6,195 tests in its first two rounds of random testing through Sept. 12. Meanwhile UT-El Paso, which tested 6,691 campus members from Aug. 17 to Sept. 18, has yet to break 2,000 weekly tests, the El Paso Times reports.
Experts say routine testing is crucial to stomping out “silent spread” on college campuses, as the CDC estimates 40% of COVID-19 infections are asymptomatic. And school officials rely on the results to get an accurate snapshot of the community’s health.
Major Texas universities have already mandated rigorous testing regimens for athletes, and some schools in other parts of the country require students and employees to get tested multiple times a week. But if the goal is to identify people who might trigger an outbreak on campus, waiting for students and staff to volunteer to get tested “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” said David Paltiel, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health.
“Frankly, I think the whole idea is flawed from the get-go,” Paltiel said. “Unless you're going to have a routine program that you require the entire population to adhere to, I just don't know what you're doing.”
School officials are stopping short of calling testing participation a problem, even as they work to increase it.
Shawn Gibbs, dean of the School of Public Health at Texas A&M, said participation is “pretty much what we expected it to be.”
“Our participation rate isn’t low,” he said. “We always would like higher participation, and we're in the process, like everyone else, of taking a look at the students who aren't participating and trying to figure out ways to incentivize participation.”
At Texas A&M, that means appealing to “selfless service,” one of the Aggie core values, and emphasizing that the saliva-based tests are free, quick and easy, Gibbs said. The flagship College Station campus reported 144 active cases as of Sept. 29.
UT-Austin’s goal is to test 1,000 asymptomatic people per day, and participation is gradually building in that direction, said Michael Godwin, program director of the university’s proactive community testing. Monday was “a really great day,” he said, with close to 700 people coming out. The flagship reported 67 estimated active cases as of Sept. 30.
To boost participation, the school is launching an incentive program, with raffle prizes for students including $50 gift cards to local and national vendors, Godwin said. The university has also enlisted professors to make class-wide announcements and deployed ads on Canvas, its online learning platform.
UT-Austin faculty participation in the testing has been “very low,” according to the Sept. 28 Faculty Council memo.
“I don’t think anyone expected to see 5,000 people in the first week,” Godwin said. “It takes a little bit of time to get the word out, to get the process set up and working well, and … we’ll continue to build on what we have and get more people in the door to get tested regularly.”
Mandatory testing at Baylor
Students might dodge invitations to test for a number of reasons – especially if they don’t feel sick, said Diana Cervantes, an epidemiologist at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Students may also be avoiding the inconvenience of quarantines in the event they do test positive.
“Let's say I think I had a high-risk exposure and I think that testing positive is going to mean something detrimental to me, maybe I'd decide not to get tested,” Cervantes said.
Julia Elder, a UT-Austin master’s student, said she has not taken the university up on its offers to get tested because she worries about being exposed to the virus during her appointment. Elder hasn’t eaten in a restaurant or socially interacted with anyone since March. She takes online classes and only leaves the West Campus apartment she shares with her twin sister to pick up food.
“I definitely have wanted to get tested … but it seems like more interaction than I do on a daily basis,” Elder said, adding that she recently drove past the health center and saw a line of students wrapped around the building. “It seems like an unnecessary risk to take if I feel fine.”
Some universities are making testing mandatory.
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, students and employees must get tested twice a week. They’re testing about 10,000 people per day, and reporting positivity rates below a half of a percent. The university feels “very confident” in its plan, in part because it’s mandatory, said Robin Neal Kaler, associate chancellor of public affairs at UIUC.
“Our data scientists showed if you tested the vast majority of people twice a week … that would be enough to slow the spread, to keep potential outbreaks under control, and to let you know about them quickly enough that you can deal with them,” Kaler said.
“But that only works if it's mandatory testing. And it only works if you're testing basically the entire population, which is what we decided to do,” she added.
In Texas, Baylor University is one of the only institutions to require testing. The private Christian university chooses 5% of students and 5% of employees for mandatory testing each week; failure to comply may result in disciplinary action.
Unlike other Texas universities, Baylor also required a negative test from students and employees before they returned to campus in August. The school reported 62 active cases as of Oct. 1.
“We felt ... we needed to make it mandatory partly because there was some concern if people were left on their own, they would not want to be tested,” said Jim Marsh, dean for student health and wellness at Baylor. He added that even though the testing is mandatory, the school gives students raffle prizes such as meal vouchers, football tickets and scholarships for participating.
Legality in question
So far, none of the major public universities in Texas require testing – though some have left the door open.
Godwin said state law restricts UT-Austin’s authority to require testing “as a prerequisite to accessing any kind of educational benefit, or work, in the case of faculty and staff.”
“We are following the advice of the Office of the Attorney General,” UT spokesperson J.B. Bird said in an email. “State universities have not been delegated the authority to mandate testing as a requirement for pursuing an education.”
A spokesperson for the Texas attorney general's office said they can’t comment on whether it’s legal to require students to get tested because the office hasn’t been asked to give an official opinion on the matter.
In September, UT-Austin students had to test negative to attend a football game against UT-El Paso, even though the other 15,000 fans did not. Godwin said testing was allowed to be required in that instance because football games are not considered an educational benefit.
But Texas A&M has said it will move to mandatory testing if school officials deem it necessary.
“Our legal view is that we have the legal authority to require random testing on campus if it is necessary to protect public health and safety, but the issue has not been squarely addressed by the courts,” said System spokesperson Laylan Copelin. “So far, voluntary participation has been sufficient to meet the public health goal and mandatory testing is not necessary.”
For now, school officials hope their messaging and prizes will turn out more students, though Elder, the UT master’s student, questions whether it will be enough.
“Anything short of a reduction in tuition, there's no incentive they could provide anyone for getting tested,” Elder said.
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of North Texas and Baylor University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/05/texas-coronavirus-college-free-tests/.
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Returning to Football
College football is starting back up with a new burden: It's the most visible evidence of the wisdom of putting Texas students back on campus.
Analysis: College football is back — as both a spectacular and a science experiment
"Analysis: College football is back — as both a spectacular and a science experiment" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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Texas’ college football players won’t be the only people with butterflies in their stomachs this weekend.
They’re just the most public players in the state’s reopenings of educational institutions, a fraught statewide foray into in-person education, live arena events, and the kinds of young adult interactions that have made coronavirus hot spots of campuses and college towns across the country.
Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University were supposed to play Friday but canceled when some TCU players and staff tested positive for COVID-19. SMU played last Saturday against Texas State University, but the TCU-SMU game would have been the first involving a Big 12 school. This weekend, two Texas schools in that conference will take the field: the University of Texas at Austin and Texas Tech University. A third was supposed to play, but Baylor University postponed its weekend game after several Louisiana Tech players tested positive. Texas State will play again, this time against UT-San Antonio.
Returning to school is a test for the students, the schools and the state. Returning to football, with its wider audience and high visibility, raises the stakes.
Not everybody has followed the stories about COVID-19 cases at colleges in Texas and elsewhere. Search the internet for “COVID” and the name of your favorite school, and you’ll get a quick peek. For a lot of places, things are going well; either the students know what they’re doing, the schools know what they’re doing, or both.
Lots of places aren’t so lucky. The New York Times surveyed 203 counties where students make up at least 10% of the population — college towns, basically. Half of those had their worst pandemic weeks after Aug. 1.
Many schools have COVID-19 dashboards to keep everybody up to date. Here’s one at UT-Austin, where cases have jumped in the last couple of weeks. Another, at Texas A&M University, tells a similar story — that cases rise when school starts and the population swells.
Increases in coronavirus cases were expected. The question — and it’s still unanswered at this point — is whether it’s wise, on balance, to reopen in the way Texas colleges have reopened.
In the meantime, the most visible results tend to be the negative ones. And the blame tends to be aimed at students — especially when they’re off campus — and not at the administrators and others running the schools. If you put a bunch of young people together, away from home, with plenty of free time, you don’t get something you’ve never seen before — you get what you’d expect.
But the students are the reopening vanguard for the rest of us.
Some schools planned for this better than others. Some were ready to handle coronavirus outbreaks, and others are learning. For instance, schools that had been sending sick students home are now keeping them on campus, in quarantine, where they don’t take a contagious disease back to their families and their hometowns.
Students, like everyone else, are looking for ways to blow off steam, to enjoy their leisure time. At the moment, they’re shut out of bars, restaurants and other gathering places. Swimming pools and river tubing and similar adventures are off limits. As Karen Brooks Harper reported for The Texas Tribune, the responses vary. Baylor is cracking down to see that students don’t get rambunctious in ways that would spread the virus. Texas A&M has asked the surrounding community to report big off-campus parties and gatherings.
But now college football is back. It’s one of the most visible things colleges do. It’s full of built-in social distancing violations, too, with crowded arenas, tailgate parties, house parties, sports bars and all the rest.
All that is supposed to be on hold this year, or tamped down to a nonthreatening size. The players have their own risks — remember those TCU and Louisiana Tech examples. Students on the whole have had their own risks since they began drifting back to campus for the fall semester.
Now the fans will be tested, and in two ways. They’ll either behave or not; it’s just as easy to spread a virus if everybody gets together in front of a TV set as it would be at a tailgate.
Second is the test that’s of interest to people in college administration, in government and in politics: Whether it’s smart to proceed with a season of college football during this pandemic — and with a semester of students gathering on and around the campuses of the colleges that field the teams.
Disclosure: Baylor University, Southern Methodist University, Texas A&M University, Texas Christian University, Texas Tech University and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/11/texas-football-coronavirus/.
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Texas Students - Tuition Should Decrease due to Pandemic
Students with financial hardships and a hurting economy say tuition should be lowered at their Texas universities. But some colleges are adding new fees related to an increase in distance learning.
Texas students said pandemic-era tuition should be cut. But it’s going up at some schools due to distance learning fees.
"Texas students said pandemic-era tuition should be cut. But it’s going up at some schools due to distance learning fees." was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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Paying for her tuition at the University of North Texas was already going to be a challenge this fall for Aimee Tambwe. Just recently, her dad — who helps pay for her education — lost his job because of pandemic-related layoffs.
So Tambwe, who is taking most of her classes remotely this semester, was dumbfounded to see her tuition bill increase by $315 because of “distance education” fees for five courses she’s signed up to take.
“This is not something that we can control. I didn’t plan for a pandemic,” Tambwe said. “I don’t think it’s fair to increase the fees on top of students losing their jobs and funding. This does not help me.”
Students across Texas are denouncing what they view as unfair increases in fees that add to the financial strain on students, especially during a pandemic in which thousands of Texans are losing their jobs and their homes. It’s further injury to students who have instead argued for tuition decreases because of restrictions to campus amenities and experiences that are typically paid for with their fees.
At the University of North Texas, the distance learning fee is $35 per credit hour, capped at $315. According to the school’s website, the fee is used to support the management, delivery and technology for distance education courses.
UNT officials say it’s not a new fee, but because the pandemic has necessitated more students going remote, the fee is being applied more widely.
UNT Provost Jennifer Cowley said in an interview that she was sympathetic to students’ frustration.
“I totally understand where it would be coming from,” Cowley said.
Currently, 28% of the fall’s course offerings are online and come with the corresponding distance learning fee, Cowley said.
As students call for tuition cuts, Texas university officials have defended their prices, saying that online classes are not less expensive than in-person classes because faculty and staff still need to be paid. There are also some additional costs associated with technology upgrades needed for more remote instruction.
At other schools across Texas, students are facing sticker shock over some price hikes made months before the pandemic. At the University of Texas at Austin, undergraduate tuition rates will increase by 2.6% per year until 2022, a move that will increase tuition by more than $140 per semester for the next two years.
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A recent petition from the Texas State Employees Union calls for a tuition decrease of 10% for the duration of the pandemic across the University of Texas System. There are at least five tuition-related lawsuits against Texas universities, stemming from students demanding discounted tuition or reimbursements because of the campus changes related to COVID-19 responses.
A recent survey of UT-Austin students also showed that 91% of students were not satisfied with tuition rates.
Gabrielle Vidmar, a Texas State University student, said the San Marcos school had estimated she would pay nearly $7,000 in tuition and fees for the fall semester – including almost $1,000 in new “electronic course” and “off-campus class” fees for classes that had been designated as online because of the pandemic. Her previous tuition bills have been around $4,000.
Texas State later reversed course and shaved off many fees for students, including Vidmar. But the sting remains, compounded by the fact that Vidmar’s money will still be going toward services like athletics and the library, neither of which she plans to participate in or use during the pandemic.
“We are not getting the bang for our buck,” Vidmar said. “It sucks ... that the general consensus is that we feel Texas State doesn’t care about us. And that they’re in it for the money.”
A spokesperson for the school declined to comment and referred questions to a statement released by the school.
Texas State University revised its fee structure in late July. If a student has at least one face-to-face class, school officials said, the $50 per-credit-hour electronic course fee would be dropped. But if a student only takes online and hybrid courses, the electronic course fees would remain while $342 in on-campus fees will be waived.
“Texas State leadership recognizes the hardships our Bobcat Community is experiencing because of COVID-19,” a message from the school reads. It notes that the change will waive more than $7 million in fees for students.
Students like Vidmar, with one in-person class, are off the hook. But others, who may be afraid to go to campus or who simply are placed in online-only classes, will be charged the full slate of distance education fees.
“We didn’t get a stimulus check, we didn’t get help from anyone,” said McKenzie Decker, a Texas State student who started a petition to erase all the online fees. “They’re screwing over students that may not have a choice here.”
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas System, the University of North Texas and Texas State University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/24/texas-tuition-universities/.
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Texas Universities are Moving More Classes Online
Universities are moving forward with reopening plans for the fall semester, anxious to bring students back. But faced with online classes and an altered campus, students are questioning if college is still worth what they're paying.
Texas universities are moving more classes online but keeping tuition the same. Students are asking if it's worth the money.
"Texas universities are moving more classes online but keeping tuition the same. Students are asking if it's worth the money." was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Sarah Ramos has spent her summer anxiously awaiting a fall return to Texas A&M’s campus at College Station. She is hoping for some normalcy after she and her classmates were abruptly forced off campus last semester and into Zoom-based classes for the remainder of the spring due to the coronavirus pandemic.
But as Texas scrambles to address a soaring number of COVID-19 cases, Ramos is worried her upcoming course load could once again be moved online. That’s just not the college experience she’s looking for. So now, Ramos says she’s considering withdrawing from A&M for the fall and delaying her upcoming graduation.
“I do want to return to school, but the likelihood of that is teetering right now,” said Ramos, who’s working at a grocery store over the summer to save up for tuition. “I want the best education possible, and I really don't think that I can get that online. I can't get that from a screen.”
Texas universities are finalizing their fall reopening plans as August approaches. The state’s major public universities are generally all offering some in-person classes, though most schools have moved sizable portions of the fall course schedule online or are offering classes in a hybrid format. A&M is planning on conducting at least 50% of classes online-only, while UT will move almost one-third of its 11,000 courses online.
These plans also paint a picture of significantly-altered campus life, with spaced out dining halls, capacity caps on classrooms and mask mandates for students and faculty in some schools.
But while school will look different, the tuition rates for many of Texas’ largest universities, including UT-Austin, University of Houston, University of North Texas and Texas Tech, will stay the same.
Now Ramos, and many other students across Texas who are weighing their plans for the fall semester, are asking themselves: will it still be worth it?
This summer, nearly all Texas universities went completely online and schools including UT-Austin and Baylor offered reduced tuition while several others waived fees for campus services like parking.
Campus leaders, hammered by financial losses from the pandemic and anxious to keep enrollment up, defended their decisions to maintain normal tuition rates for fall classes that are both online and in-person.
“UT represents one of the very best values in higher education in the country,” UT-Austin interim President Jay Hartzell said last week in a press conference, noting that administrators “have been working really hard to ensure we deliver online courses at high quality and ideally make the class just as valuable as it would have been face to face.”
Acknowledging some resistance to going virtual, UT System board members in a meeting cited surveys that have shown many students said they will pause their education if universities go completely online.
Texas Tech President Lawrence Schovanec said that while around 80% of Texas Tech University’s 1,000 fall courses will be online, tuition will not be decreased in the fall.
Like many others, the school can’t afford to discount classes, because instructors are paid the same regardless. Schovanec said more than 65% of the university’s expenses are directly related to compensating faculty and other personnel.
“There’s a misunderstanding that online classes are cheaper,” Schovanec said. “When people write to me and say ‘Hey, I’m not getting face to face instruction, give me a tuition reduction,’ it's inconsistent with the reality of our budget.”
Lawsuits
The question of student value in the fall is poised to become a legal battle. Already more than 150 lawsuits have been filed across the country from students seeking reimbursement for tuition and fees from last spring.
When the pandemic forced universities to vacate their campuses in March, students lost access to campus labs, technology, transportation, athletics, library services, dining halls and more.
Baylor University was no exception. After it closed its doors, some students who lost access to those student-funded services wanted refunds for their steep tuition rates and campus fees.
Baylor, which received around $10.7 million in federal funding to offset emergency aid and refunds for students, promised students credits for unused meal plans and dining dollars, but insisted online learning did not necessitate refunds on tuition and campus fees.
But that wasn’t enough for students like Allison King, a rising sophomore at Baylor, who filed a class-action lawsuit in early June seeking prorated refunds for tuition and fees like a $90 payment for mandatory chapel sessions. Another Baylor student, Nabor Camarena, filed a similar lawsuit at the same time.
“In any other business, if you get paid all the money and then cut the services you’re providing, we would call that profiting from a pandemic,” said Roy Willey, the attorney representing King. “The sacrifice here is on the part of the students that are paying for this.”
Baylor is the first in Texas to be sued for tuition-related grievances following the pandemic.
The university said in a statement that it stands by its decisions made in an "unprecedented time for our country and all of higher education."
Other universities have already shelled out millions in refunds for unused services like meal plans and campus housing from last spring. While some of these losses were offset by federal funding designated by the CARES Act, much of it had to be covered by the institutions’ own budgets, leaving universities under financial strain as they worked to refund hundreds of students and award emergency aid.
Living expenses
The partial shift to online also has more students and parents worried about paying for college housing.
Ann Marie Hicks, who lives in Austin, will have two daughters in college this fall. With a combination of online and in-person courses, Hicks’ eldest daughter Allison, a rising senior at the University of North Texas, will only have to be in Denton for 26 days out of the entire semester.
While minimizing contact with campus is a relief in some ways, setting up living arrangements in a different city is a financial headache, Hicks said. The house Allison is planning on moving into with her partner to avoid crowded student apartments will be more than $900 in rent per month, plus additional utilities and maintenance fees. Hicks is having a hard time rationalizing the cost.
“It’s frustrating,” Hicks said. “And I’m mindful that there are many families under more constraints than we are.”
The same goes for Gaby Alvarez, a rising junior studying journalism at UT-Austin. She’s worried about contracting COVID-19 on campus – but she’s also worried about getting stuck with her lease, which she signed back in October.
As of now, Alvarez said she only has one in-person class, which isn’t a compelling enough reason to justify the $880 monthly rent she pays for an apartment near campus. Originally from Ganado, where she’s been quarantining with her elderly grandparents, she said she’d prefer to stay home if she could get out of her lease and move to all online classes.
“This is such a hard situation with a lot of moving parts,” Alvarez said. “And going back (to school) is not worth it to me, financially and health-wise.”
But the promise of the campus experience, however diluted, is a major draw for some students.
Hicks’ younger daughter Annabelle, an incoming freshman at Trinity University in San Antonio, is a theater major and is trying to take as many in-person classes as she can. Annabelle also deals with learning impediments like dyslexia, which she said makes online learning harder and in-person instruction valuable.
“Reading and communicating are already difficult face to face, but when I’m doing it through a screen it becomes even worse,” Annabelle said. “If I’m taking the risk of being on-campus anyway, what’s the point of taking classes online?”
Jorge Cantu, an international graduate student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is also watching the situation carefully. He splits his time between the U.S. and Mexico and if his classes were to be moved online, he’d remain in Mexico to save money on rent.
But he’d miss being on campus and would lose out on using the thousands of books in the university library or other research resources to finish out his thesis.
There was no refund for fees at his university during the spring closures, including the library fee, which doesn’t seem fair to him if he’s unable to use those services.
“I think that’s one of the things that pisses people off the most,” he said. ”We’re getting charged for fees that we’re not actually going to take advantage of.”
Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin, University of North Texas, Texas Tech, University of Houston and University of Texas Rio Grande Valley have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporcate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/06/texas-universities-coronavirus-online-classes/.
The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state. Explore the next 10 years with us.