On the first day of classes at the University of Massachusetts Boston last week, students, professors and staff — most of them masked — poured in from standing-room-only campus shuttles.
More than 20 months after the state’s first public COVID-19 case was reported on this breezy bayside campus in Dorchester, UMass Boston is flowing again, finally.
“We’re super excited to be back,” said labor historian and antropology professor Steve Striffler, stepping off a bus and then winding his way across campus for the first time in a long time. “I think we all recognize that in-person education really beats remote.”
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As a third consecutive pandemic-tainted school year begins, different types of public colleges in Massachusetts are taking divergent approaches to teaching classes. A GBH News survey of the 29 colleges finds most courses at four-year universities like UMass Boston are in-person, while most at two-year community colleges are online.
Researchers say difference results from the application of vaccine mandates and the different kinds of students schools serve.
“The population that community colleges by and large serve are nonresidential,” said Chris Marsicano, who directs the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College, which tracks colleges’ COVID response plans. “They’re not living on campus. It’s harder to mandate [vaccination] when you don’t know where your students are at any given time.”
Marsicano’s team found that, across the country, just 7% of community colleges are requiring the vaccine. That’s compared to nearly half of private colleges and about a third of public four-year schools like UMass Boston.
Regardless of vaccine mandates, Marsicano said most colleges in the United States are attempting to return to their previously scheduled, pre-pandemic programming this month.
“Those institutions that are changing their approach are leaning a little bit more heavily on online than in prior years, but the vast majority of institutions want to be back in person — back to the pre-pandemic normal,” Marsicano said.
Those colleges that decided to go remote early on are going all-in this semester.
That’s certainly the case at Cape Cod Community College in Barnstable, where administrators say 84% of all courses this semester will be either online, remote or hybrid.
“Two years ago, how many of us knew about Zoom?” asked President John Cox, welcoming back faculty during at a kick-off event inside a theater on campus. All of the professors wore masks, sitting at least three feet apart.
Last spring, the community college decided to stay primarily online this fall.
“If we wanted to be in a strong position to weather this challenge, we had to be using the technology at the highest level possible,” Cox said. “We did this monumental pivot to embracing the technology — technology that was not on anyone's radar screen. But in order to sustain higher education, we had to move into the online and virtual marketplace and we had to move there literally overnight.”
Professors say that decision has paid off.
“Going remote really opened our footprint,” said Daniel Shea, who coordinates the Cape Cod Community College degree program in funeral service.
The professor says the pandemic forced the college to rethink how it reaches people who may have been hesitant to enroll in person.
“They wanted to do it, but they couldn’t come because they couldn’t uproot their lives,” Shea said. “They have families. They have a job. And now we want to maintain that footprint.”
To help do that, Shea has been piloting the college’s new hybrid platform that allows online students to livestream into otherwise in-person classes on embalming.
His classroom is outfitted with a massive computer screen, a 360-degree camera and a microphone that captures him and his students from as far as 30 feet away.
Shea admits this high-tech teaching is not easy.
“It is a juggling act, but it’s not impossible,” he said. “You see people in front of you. You have to make sure you’re interacting with the people that are on the screen as well. We can hear them just like they’re in their regular classroom.”
UMass Boston, on the other hand, is limiting online options to courses that need to be delivered remotely “for various reasons,” according to a spokesperson. Most classes, like the Latin American labor history course that Striffler teaches, are in-person, with his 80 students packed into a lecture hall.
“It’s good to see all your masked faces,” he said, standing in front of his class. “A little weird though.”
Striffler says he and more than 80% of surveyed faculty at least want the option to go online. “One of our requests would be to have a larger percentage of classes taught remotely," he said.
In an email to the campus community, UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suarez-Orozco said “as Boston’s only public university serving largely first-generation college students ... in-person education is not only what students long for ... but also what they need.”
Students on campus seem to agree.
“I’m excited because I kind of learn in-person rather than remote,” said Izabel DePina from Dorchester.
At 38, she’s the first in her family to go to college. Last year, the Cape Verdean immigrant took all of her courses online, which, she says, went OK.
“I got good grades, but it wasn’t the same as in person,” she said. “I missed going after the professor, like, ‘Hey, I need help.’”
Wearing a Black Lives Matter, “No Justice, No Peace” mask, DePina said she is urging her classmates to get vaccinated.
“We just got to be safe,” she said. “Follow the rules and make sure we finish strong.”
A spokesman for UMass Boston told GBH News that 98% of registered students have complied with university’s vaccination requirement. The remaining 2% are either exempt or will be dropped from registration this week. To try to keep the campus and surrounding community safe, the university is offering free vaccinations at various clinics around campus and is following all recommended CDC protocols for contract tracing.
Despite those precautions, several faculty members told GBH News that one administrator told UMass Boston professors in a private meeting earlier this month that he expected there would be “a lot of COVID cases on campus.”
Fifteen cases have been reported since classes started Sept. 7, according to the university.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of positive COVID-19 cases since UMass Boston started classes. The number is 15, not more than 150.
GBH’s Diane Adame contributed to this report.
