University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce and student Sukhdeep Singh participate in a coding event in 2015. (UW Photo / Dennis Wise)

As the University of Washington prepares for the first virtual graduation in its 159-year history, President Ana Mari Cauce is focused on what happens a few months later.

Speaking at a virtual town hall with other university presidents Wednesday, Cauce said she expects to welcome UW students back to campus in the fall despite uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s more, the class of 2024 is poised to be “our largest freshman class ever,” Cauce said.

To make that possible, UW is planning for a hybrid approach combining online learning with small-scale in-person education. Large lectures will likely be held online but smaller classes, particularly those that require laboratories, could be held in-person with physical distancing.

“We are actively planning for having our students come back,” Cauce said. “We want them in the dorms. We know that a very important part of the learning experience happens in the classroom from other students, but also outside of the classroom in their interactions with faculty, in labs, with each other. We’re looking forward to bringing that richness back.”

The UW moved to remote learning in early March as the COVID-19 outbreak shut down schools across the world.

Cauce was joined by Arizona State University President Michael Crow and Purdue University President Mitchell Daniels to discuss a question weighing heavily on their field: How will the pandemic reshape higher education?

It’s a subject of much debate, with some like New York University’s Scott Galloway forecasting dramatic shifts. Colleges everywhere will be forced to embrace the hybrid learning approach and re-invent themselves or struggle to survive, according to Galloway.

“There will be a lot of zombie universities,” Galloway told New York Magazine. “Alumni will step in to help. They’ll cut costs to figure out how to stay alive, but they’ll effectively be the walking dead. I don’t think you’re going to see massive shutdowns, but there’s going to be a strain on tier-two colleges.”

Universities are looking for creative solutions to daunting budget cuts. UW Medicine — a lifeline in studying and responding to the COVID-19 crisis — is furloughing 5,500 employees to cope with plummeting revenue.

“We have these absolute heroes that have been at the forefront and we’re doing some furloughing because we want to avoid layoffs,” Cauce said. “Because a number of places like our hospitals, like housing and food services, like our study abroad programs that are based on — in essence — user fees, have already experienced very significant budget shortfalls that we are in the process of managing.”

Those challenges will only become more acute as UW allows some students to enroll remotely. Cauce expects students who face higher risks of complications from COVID-19 will take all of their classes online, a shift that would be a financial hit for the university.

It costs money to transition classes online, as the UW has done for 98% of its courses. And colleges lose money when students aren’t paying for room and board. The University of Michigan estimates it could lose up to $1 billion by the end of the year and for the University of Kentucky, that figure is $70 million, NPR reports.

In the New York Magazine interview, Galloway predicted that universities will partner with technology giants to offer students a mix of online and offline degrees.

“I just can’t imagine what the enrollments would be if Apple partnered with a school to offer programs in design and creativity,” Galloway said. “I can’t imagine what the enrollments would be if the University of Washington partnered with Microsoft around technology or engineering. These would be huge enrollments. The tech company would be responsible for scale and the online group part. The university would be responsible for the accreditation.”

Cauce said budget cuts at the UW “will have very lasting consequences,” but “we will survive.”

“This crisis has created, in essence, thousands of laboratories across the nation experimenting with different approaches to teaching, to learning, to evaluation, to assessment and we will be looking to see which experiments have been more successful, which haven’t,” Cauce said. “We will be leading with that science. There’s no question we already are.”

One potential issue with remote learning is inequitable access to broadband and technology, said Frank Catalano, an education technology industry consultant and longtime GeekWire collaborator. The pandemic has pushed many post-secondary instructors “into the deep end of the distance learning pool,” Catalano said.

“Fall 2020 will not be the same as fall 2019, and what institutions do will not be parallel,” he said. “We’ve entered a time of great and frightening experimentation with online learning, and there will be some instructors and institutions that barely tread water, others that develop an Olympics-worthy backstroke, and probably not just a few who sink to the bottom — and take their students with them.”

GeekWire last week spoke with former Washington Gov. Gary Locke, recounting a group he created in 1998 called the “2020 Commission” that aimed to set a vision for higher education in the future. It sparked an outcry from professors worried about instruction via internet — and the debate over online education still continues today, albeit more than two decades later.

“I’ve always been a major proponent of that personal interaction between the faculty and the students,” Locke said last week. “Clearly, using technology can make it easier for both faculty and students. But there’s still no substitute for that human interaction.”

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