The Key To Safely Reopening Colleges: Testing

The fall 2020 semester is underway at most colleges and universities across the country, but not all are dealing with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic in the same way. According to data aggregated by the College Crisis Initiative, 44% of colleges and universities that have announced their plans are operating mostly online this semester, while 28% are operating mostly in-person and 21% are pursuing a hybrid model.

In a report I coauthored for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), we advocate reopening institutions of higher education wherever it is safely possible to do so. Holding college classes in-person tends to result in higher learning gains and lower attrition, all else being equal. (Though well-done online education is possible, most universities are not doing it well.)

But it is only safe to reopen college campuses if schools have the capacity to quickly identify and isolate students who contract Covid-19. Not every school has built that capacity. To illustrate this point, I collected data on Covid-19 testing at the twelve largest public universities that 1) are reopening for in-person or hybrid instruction and 2) have released good-quality data on the total number of times they have tested students for Covid-19.

The undisputed leader in Covid-19 testing is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As of September 9, Illinois had tested over 256,000 individuals for Covid-19, having developed a new test in campus laboratories that provides results within hours. After the university resumed classes on August 24, it required all students and staff on campus to undergo testing at least twice per week.

President Timothy Killeen admits that some students will be infected with Covid-19 on campus—about 0.9% of the university’s tests have come back positive—but that underscores the importance of large-scale testing. “We will face outbreaks, there’s no question. What we’re going to do is have actionable tests so that we quickly squelch down the outbreak,” said Killeen in an interview with CNBC. “The key is time, because if we give the virus no time to spread from an infected individual to others, we can stop its transmission.”

Not every school will be able to test every student twice per week. But a key strategy in controlling the spread of Covid-19 is testing all on-campus students at the beginning of the semester, to ensure that asymptomatic individuals do not import the virus from their hometowns. Several institutions conducted pre-arrival testing. Purdue University, for instance, mailed free saliva-based Covid-19 test kits to on-campus students before the semester began. Students then returned their completed kits, and were not allowed back on campus unless they showed a negative result.

Other universities have adopted more unconventional approaches. The University of Arizona tested wastewater from twenty campus buildings for signs of Covid-19. When one of the dormitories yielded a positive result, the school then tested all students living in that building and discovered two infected but asymptomatic individuals. The school was able to isolate those students before they spread the disease to others.

But not every school is on top of testing. Five of the twelve largest public institutions with sufficient data availability have run fewer than 10,000 tests each, even though their student bodies all exceed 35,000. Schools without sufficient testing capacity are at higher risk of sudden closure if they face a serious outbreak, since they may not be able to isolate infected individuals in time.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provides a cautionary tale. The Tar Heel State flagship shifted all undergraduate classes online in the first week of the semester after a surge in positive cases. When that happened, the university had performed fewer than 3,000 tests on a student body of over 30,000, which almost certainly hampered efforts to control the outbreak.

College leaders’ desire to resume in-person instruction this fall is the correct one. But safe reopening will not be possible without the ability to identify and control Covid-19 outbreaks when they occur. While the best time for universities to build up testing capacity was over the summer, schools that are still lagging behind should prioritize increasing their capacity now. Testing could determine whether schools can complete the fall semester in-person or revert ignominiously to online instruction.

Disclosure: I am a PhD student at George Mason University, one of the institutions analyzed in this article.