COVID-19 on Campus: How Should Schools Be Redesigned?

REDESIGNING ACADEMIC IN STITUTIONS so that they can reopen and function safely in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic is a challenging problem. Part of the value from a traditional education in an elite institution is socialization as a member of the future elites in finance, business more broadly, law, government, and industry. You meet and become friendly with people who will work with you for decades to come, whose trust you likewise will need for decades. So how should these institutions be redesigned in ways that preserve the advantages of on-campus learning while also incorporating online instruction?

Wharton’s Eric K. Clemons, a professor of operations, information and decisions, focuses on the redesign of academic institutions in this opinion piece. As he writes, “We do this in part because it is a pressing problem that requires a solution now, if universities, faculty, and students are to plan effectively for an event that is less than three months away. In addition, we study these institutions as examples that other industries may need to consider as they approach their own redesign if they cannot implement full virtualization.” (Clemons acknowledges the contributions of his colleagues Talal Shamoon and Kezia Wright of Intertrust.)

Every institution that provides goods and services to the public needs to consider carefully how it will redesign itself to function in the environment created by COVID-19. Long-term planning will need to wait until we have greater certainty about the environment we will face. (See my previous articles in Knowledge@Wharton on alternative scenarios created by the virus and alternative scenarios created by public response to the virus.) But we are beginning phased reopening now, and organizations need a design for providing goods and services to the public now. We can already see that improper design, even suboptimal design, can be catastrophic.

Optimal design involves complex tradeoffs. For some industries there is no successful redesign and for others the redesign is relatively straightforward. We will focus on elite academic institutions like Harvard College, The

Wharton School, Peking University Law School, and Ecole National d’Administration in Strasbourg, because some continuation of their faceto-face operation is essential to their entire value proposition, and because redesign to safely achieve this is most complex.

Optimal design involves trading off two competing objectives. The first is to maximize safety and public health. If that were our only objective, we would continue the lockdown and prevent all indoor public spaces from reopening until a vaccine were available and had been proven effective even in the face of continuing mutation of the COVID-19 Virus. That is impossible. Likewise, if we were to choose to maximize speed of return to the world before the virus, we would drop all restrictions immediately and allow businesses to open immediately without redesign. That is also clearly impossible. Even if public officials were to embrace this objective, most of the public would not, and those that did would contribute to a resurgence of the virus. We need to balance protecting public health and the speed of reopening the economy.

We need to determine to what extent we can deliver services adequately through virtual online alternatives. We need to determine to what extent we can deliver traditional services effectively through safe redesign, which manages public risks and to convince the public that risks have indeed been managed. And we need to find the optimal balance.

In some industries there is no redesign that saves it from total economic collapse. Movie theaters represent the most extreme example. Services can effectively be delivered virtually through streaming video, and the industry is already moving in that direction. Netflix and Home Box Office are thriving under lockdown, and even before the virus they were already developing their own proprietary content. And most theaters cannot survive with 30% occupancy. Seating in every other seat, and in every other row, creates effective social distancing. Theaters with adequate spacing already exist, like the VIP Theaters in Toronto. However, these seats are enormously more expensive, and profits come as much from selling craft beer and good wine and dinners as they come from selling tickets. This cannot be scaled up. The vast majority of movie theaters will never reopen.

In other industries, effective redesign is more complex but already appears successful. Retailing will be transformed but that industry already is adapting. Amazon delivers most shelf-stable food items and dominates online delivery of most other products. Specialty retailers are achieving a balance of in-store shopping, curb-side pickup, and next day delivery. I get most of my shelf-stable items liked canned goods and jarred goods delivered by Amazon. I get my imported cheeses and dry aged prime meats delivered by DiBruno’s.

Redesigning elite academic institutions provides a concrete example of the most difficult design problem. Part of the value from a traditional education in an elite institution is socialization as a member of the future elites in finance, business more broadly, law, government, and industry. You meet and become friendly with people who will work with you for decades to come, whose trust you likewise will need for decades. And you will meet more peers at other elite institutions through events like inter-school rugby tournaments. Military academies understand that their missions are complex, and they must include discipline and trust in your future cohort of peer officers as much as they include tactics, strategy, and military history.

In the rest of this article, we focus on redesign of academic institutions. We do this in part because it is a pressing problem that requires a solution now, if universities, faculty, and students are to plan effectively for an event that is less than three months away. In addition, we study these institutions as examples that other industries may need to consider as they approach their own redesign if they cannot implement full virtualization.

Implications for Reopening Campuses in Fall 2020

As noted, a significant portion of the value of attending an elite institution is the informal time spent with faculty and with other students, and much of this value can be destroyed by improper redesign of the campus before reopening. Design needs to be guided by estimates of the state of the virus and the state of the economy in August and September.

Although I have done a more comprehensive study of the alternative futures that will face academic institutions over the coming years, we can accurately predict the most important elements of the environment that all organizations will face in September. We can assume that virus will still be with us, but under some degree of control due to social distancing. We cannot assume that the virus will have been eliminated, because we are already experiencing the impact of imperfect designs employed as many states rush to reopen. We can also assume that state, local, and federal governments will still be dealing with the massive debt created by the virus over the past several months. Further, we can assume that many families are still dealing with the financial hardship created by the lockdown.

I started considering alternative strategies for reopening by constructing a simulation model and running it under a wide range of conditions. Let us not attempt to predict a single outcome with certainty; let us do sensitivity analysis under a wide range of assumptions and examine the implications for prudent risk management. The actual simulation was constructed rapidly by students working under my direction as a term project and we cannot trust the specific values predicted, like the speed of the spread of the virus, or the percentage of instruction that would need to be virtual in order make opening a campus safe. But the results do suggest alternative strategies.

Let us assume that all returning students and all returning faculty and staff are virus-free at the start of the semester, which will allow us to create the most optimistic assessment of the risks of reopening. However, we cannot assume that the campus remains virus-free indefinitely. The Hyderabad campus of the Indian School of Business was designed as a clean bubble, a place that is sealed, where it is safe for a Western visitor to drink the water and to order lettuce, tomato, and cucumber on a Subway sandwich. No American university was designed as a bubble, and we can assume with certainty that some individuals will contract the virus off-campus, visiting, dining out, or traveling. We need to assess whether the inevitable undetected arrival of disease carriers on campus can be managed, or whether it will lead to unmanageable spread of the disease across an entire campus.

Structure of the Model

We start with a Healthy population in three age groups, corresponding to Students, most Faculty and Staff, and the Oldest faculty and staff. We assume that individuals on a campus meet principally as a result of three activities: class, dining, and dormitory. We assume that essentially all non-academic activities, from sports to drama and music, will have been canceled. We do not base our model on traditional estimates of R0, the average number of people infected by each carrier of the disease. Rather, we model the probability that an encounter with an infected person will lead to a new infection (NewInfectionProb), the number of people each individual encounters in a day (NumberOfContacts), and the probability that any individual encounter will be with a person who is already a carrier (InfectedProb). InfectedProb is computed by determining the percentage of individuals on campus who are carriers of the virus. R0, the average number of people infected as the virus progresses through a campus, can be derived from these three terms. We model the transition of individuals from the Healthy population, into Exposed, Infectious Asymptomatic, Infectious Sick, Recovered Immune, or Deceased.

We explore the impact of various interventions. First is full PPE or other protection for faculty and staff. Second is mandatory social distancing for students in the classroom. Third is mandatory social distancing for students in dining and student housing. Fourth is social contact tracing without testing. Fifth is social contact tracing with frequent and regular testing. These interventions can be combined to yield various strategies for reopening a campus.

Strategy 1: Do Nothing and Strive for Herd Immunity

A university campus is not and cannot be perfectly sealed and perfectly isolated. Students will encounter infected individuals while shopping, dining, traveling, or socializing. Not surprisingly, we note that a disease-free campus is inherently unstable, because the daily number of contacts each individual has is so high. With no intervention to limit the spread, once the virus has been introduced infection would soon overwhelm the entire campus, as it would do without intervention in other places where people are tightly confined, like a prison. Fatalities among elderly faculty or staff would certainly occur. Deaths among students with pre-existing medical conditions is highly likely as well. With the speed of infection of the entire campus, education would certainly be disrupted, and the university might be legally liable for its inability to provide a safe operating environment. Reopen and change nothing is not a viable strategy.

Strategy 2: Protect the Vulnerable and Strive for

Herd Immunity Among Students

The first active intervention would be to protect the faculty and staff while making no other active interventions. This would reduce or eliminate death among these groups. It would eliminate only one source of contagion, that due to exposure from infected faculty. It would not slow the spread of the disease sufficiently. We could not be certain that the disease would not become rampant within a campus, and we could not ensure that normal university operations could continue. Additionally, providing a safe environment for faculty without providing similar protection for students would raise serious ethical and legal concerns. This analysis is equally valid for any organization that has senior management and line employees, like a meat processing plant or a manufacturing line with staff who work with little physical separation. Protecting only the senior staff and hoping for herd immunity among the rest of the organization is not a viable strategy.

Strategy 3: Protect the Vulnerable and Slow the Spread of the Virus through Social Distancing Combined with Virtual Instruction

This strategy combines two interventions, protection for faculty and staff and enforced social distancing in the classroom and in the corridors. Perhaps one-third of students would attend class on any given day, while two-thirds would attend virtually. The actual ratio would be determined by modeling for each campus, for each building, or for each classroom where necessary. This would ensure