How universities are preparing to reopen campuses

Purdue University President Mitch Daniels recently told a United States Senate committee hearing what his institution was doing to ensure a safe campus reopening for Purdue’s 45,000 students this fall. Along with cutting classroom capacity in half, setting aside 500 beds to handle quarantined students and removing 1,000 beds from dormitories to de-densify residences, Purdue has bought one mile’s worth of Plexiglas, which will be used to shield faculty from students during lectures, writes Anna Esaki-Smith for Forbes.

The retrofitting of the Purdue campus, along with the planned testing of hundreds of thousands of students and faculty, will cost an estimated US$50 million, against a loss of possibly hundreds of millions of dollars due to enrolment shortfalls, costs due to the disrupted spring semester and financial fallout from the pandemic. To offset expenses, Purdue launched a crowdfunding campaign on 28 May.

Colleges and universities have announced multiple plans for reopening this fall. In addition to changing start and end dates for the fall term, they are adjusting plans for buildings and dormitories.
Full report on the Forbes site