Colleges working on reducing virus risk

Cutting class sizes, dorm capacity among options to prevent infection

Saint Mary’s College in Moraga is open for business this fall — but to get there, you really have to want it. Tucked amid verdant hills, accessible by a single road and a single entrance, the small, private Roman Catholic school receives almost no visitors by accident. This, in the age of a pandemic, is good news for its administrators. “We can control who comes in or out in a way that larger, urban campuses perhaps can’t do,” said William Mullen, the school’s vice provost for enrollment. “Those campuses are in many cases more permeable.” As colleges and universities across the country juggle student and staff safety, loss of opportunities and loss of revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, even seemingly secondary considerations — how many entrances a school has, how close it sits to community foot traffic, how food is served — loom large. And while officials are loath to make broad guarantees about safety, they can’t ignore public health advice and thus are immersed in an effort to at least minimize the potential for harm. What that looks like will vary wildly from campus to campus, but in almost every case it will include attempts to limit close contact with others — a difficult job for educational institutions. The stakes are enormous. Some universities already are projecting financial losses in the tens of millions due to declining enrollment and the uncertainty ahead. But at its core, this is a health problem that remains both simple and vexing: How do you open a campus without inviting mass infection?