BOSTON (WHDH) - Boston College announced Tuesday it will be ready to resume on-campus classes this fall but, for other schools, reopening plans are still in the works.
Here is what several local college presidents are saying about what the future of higher education looks like in the Bay State.
“It’s our hope to be to have some in-person classes, the curriculum in the fall term. Those will probably be complementary to some remote learning,” said Dr. Lee Pelton, President of Emerson College.
“The biggest change is going to be in the living conditions, the way our residential campuses are going to work. How our students are going to have to kind of segregate themselves into what I would call households smaller groups,” Dr. Robert Brown President of Boston University added.
Dr. Joseph Aoun, President of Northeastern University, said residential and online learning will be important but, that colleges and universities will have to adapt to students instead of the other way around.
“It is no longer to be, ‘I am giving the course today. ‘I am the center of the world,” Aoun explained. “No. You, the learners are the centers of the world and we are going to work with you.”
Dr. Pam Eddinger, president of Bunker Hill Community College, said the pandemic has hit disadvantaged students especially hard.
“I have students who will not put their faces on Zoom because they’re studying in a closet, and they do not want their poverty or their lack of resources to be exposed,” Eddinger said.
President of U Mass., Hon. Marty Meehan, voiced frustration with the online colleges from out-of-state draining students away from Massachusetts.
“I don’t want to see New England students have to go to out-of-state institutions and the truth is all the institutions I’ve just met online…they’ve been cleaning our clock and I think Massachusetts can do better,” he said.
Meehan predicts trouble for colleges and Universities that are dependent on tuition and don’t have large endowments.
He does not think New England will be able to support the same number of schools when the pandemic is over.
“I think there are going to be dramatic changes in higher education,” Meehan said.
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