San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE PANDEMIC.
He sees challenges for students, but also ‘the kind of thinking’ needed to overcome them
Danny J. Anderson has been president since 2015 of Trinity University, an elite private school of 2,400 students. We caught up with him to ask about the coronavirus pandemic’s effects on the future of higher education, especially at residential liberal arts campuses. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What does this pandemic mean for the future of higher education?
There are so many different kinds of institutions in the country, and I think the impact is going to be different for different kinds of schools. At Trinity, we expect all of our students to live on campus in residence halls for three years.
We have a generation of high school students who experienced the abrupt transformation to remote learning, and they did not like it. They missed out on their senior year of high school. They missed out on their friends. There may be some individuals who perhaps are more introverted, they may be more self-motivated and driven and they like remote learning, and so it may help them think about different options. I think we’re going to see some individuals who want that face-to-face human community even more than before.
We’re social creatures. When you think about the process of becoming a mature adult, having mentors who are with you and see you do things makes a tremendous difference. Those are things that are fantastic in a small residential college, and I don’t think that, even as we go through disruption, those desires for growth and contact and connection are going to disappear. We’ll be finding ways to blend and use technology more, at the same time that we keep delivering the kind of experience that we feel like we are best at.
Some schools have gone to a model where they’re planning on teaching in the classroom and broadcasting it remotely. Half of the students may, say, on a Tuesday, stay in their residence hall and take the class online while the other half of the class is in the room with the teacher, and then on Thursday they might swap.
At least right now, while we may go through a year of waiting for a vaccine or some therapies that really change things, everyone is thinking about: How do you still maintain that sense of community and closeness and not have too many people together in the same space? I think we will temporarily do things that are designed to promote physical safety, personal health, but I don’t think those
are going to be permanent changes.
How do you think this pandemic affects the viability and sustainability of residential liberal arts institutions?
There is much more financial pressure on many small schools, but we feel very secure as we look at our financial future. We have been saving a rainy day fund that gives us a lot more flexibility. Many small schools, because they were so dependent on the tuition revenues from students, didn’t have the opportunity to build up a rainy day fund. If they don’t get students next year, they’re going to have a real challenge.
From 18 years ago till now, each year there were fewer persons born. There is going to be a decline in the total number of adults of college-going age, so the competition is growing. For the last two to three years especially, many small, rural private schools were having a hard time.
When I look at Trinity, I feel like we’ve got several advantages. Having that urban environment with a lot of connections means that our students come to Trinity as a small residential experience, but it opens them to a whole world in the city of San Antonio. We also have an accredited school of business and an accredited engineering science program. Small liberal arts colleges that never had a chance to add some of those professional fields, or to deepen their level of science, have struggled to keep up with the demand of what students want.
The flip side of all of this is that, now more than ever, individuals with a liberal arts background are going to have a lot of skills that they can bring into the world. Their communication skills, their ability to take diverse data and pull it together in complex analyses is exactly the kind of thinking that is being used to wrestle with the problems caused by COVID-19. There’s a real place for the individual with the kind of background that we are providing to our students right now.
What about the impact on the pandemic on student life outside of the classroom?
During spring 2020, it was very gratifying to see the way that all the student organizations kept existing. Fraternities and sororities had meetings on Zoom. There was this one student club about journals, and the president of that club was in Vietnam. Another member is here in the United States, and they would schedule their meetings and keep going. I think the creativity, the drive to be connected was really strong. Our coaches spent time connecting with team members, checking in. I think that really provided a lot of healthy mental encouragement for people.
We owe it to each other to be connected, to be social, to have gatherings but also to do it in a way that’s going to be healthy. Right now we’re doing everything we can to be ready to reopen campus in the fall. We are organizing a group of coordinated task forces that are looking at different components of how campus life works. We are absorbing and sharing information about what we have to do to maintain safety and health on campus.
Do you know how dorm living is going to change?
You need to think about students who share a room or students who share a suite as more or less being like a family unit in a house. If you’re looking at a commuter campus where a lot of students live off campus, the challenge is, you do not know if those students are living in crowded situations. You don’t know if they’re living in places where they may be close to hot spots of the virus, so people living off campus could potentially be a greater risk than people living on campus.
I think the real question is, how do you develop good protocols? How do we start self-monitoring for health? Are we posing risks to people around us? When would be the right time to get a test? Those are going to be some of the keys to keeping everyone
safe.
Are you hearing from many students who don’t plan to return, and has recruitment of incoming freshmen taken a hit?
The national surveys suggest that probably 1 in 4 students who was going to start college is thinking about taking a gap year. Probably about 1 in 3 students who are in college right now are having questions. We know that many small liberal arts colleges vary between 20 percent to 5 percent below their enrollment target right now in terms of their new first-year students and some are very worried.
When we look at the students who enrolled in classes for the fall, we’re doing great. When we heard from a faculty member, “I have this student who’s having a hard time and they said they may not come back,” we’ve reached out to those students. We also were able to create a student emergency fund. I feel like we will probably have a little bit higher loss of students, but overall we feel very good.
We are really excited that we did a great job in terms of recruiting new first-year students. The worry that we have is, as everybody listens to the news in the summer, will there be melt? If we have flare-ups of COVID, will that change people’s mind about what they want to do next year?
What are the main explanations you’re hearing from students who aren’t coming back?
It really had to do with their sense of being discouraged with the remote learning during the springtime because they didn’t like it. And students who are in families where maybe one or both their parents have lost their jobs because of the economic downturn, they may worry. So we’re trying to find students like that: “Do you qualify for some new kinds of scholarship funds?” International students, we don’t know yet whether they will be able or not able to come back.
What percent of students are international?
Right now we have 5 or 6 percent, and the question is, will we be able to have students get a visa, and if they come, what are going to be our public safety guidelines? Will they need to come two weeks early and stay in quarantine?
Did Trinity take much of a financial hit when everything closed down?
We, like most universities that I’m aware of, took a big financial hit. On March 11 — it’s burned into my memory — in the afternoon I sent out the email informing students that we would ask them to vacate residence halls. We gave a second week of no classes and by the next week, we were sending e-deposits to student accounts refunding the unused portion of their room and board.
We returned $6.6 million about two weeks after Spring Break to all of our students. We felt like it was very important because we knew that for some of our students, they would need it desperately to be able to arrange for new living or to cover expenses once they were home.
I am so proud of the team of faculty members, staff members and leaders at the university that made the rapid transition a real success. None of us has ever experienced a global pandemic. It is a dramatic disruption and it’s still sinking in — what does that truly mean for all of us? It can get real emotional when you listen to how much they invest in ensuring the success of students.