University System News:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
AJC On Campus: Enrollment grows at Georgia’s largest universities
By Eric Stirgus
There were many questions about whether college enrollment would decline for the fall semester amid student health concerns stemming from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Georgia’s four largest public universities, though, are reporting enrollment increases in various categories. Here’s a closer look at some of the more interesting numbers:
WSAV
Georgia Southern Greek life suspends events to slow COVID-19 spread
by: WSAV Staff
Georgia Southern fraternity and sorority life councils voted last week to suspend all social events and in-person meetings through Oct. 1 in response to COVID-19. Organizational meetings will be held virtually. Before the start of classes, all recruitment events were also held virtually. In the first week of classes, from Aug. 17 to Aug. 23, the university reported 71 confirmed cases of COVID-19 between its Statesboro and Armstrong campuses. No cases were reported on the Liberty campus. …Georgia Southern says the decision was made “out of an abundance of caution to keep the university community safe.”
Savannah Business Journal
Georgia Southern awarded $1.3M federal grant to help disadvantaged students succeed
Georgia Southern University has been awarded a $1.3 million, five-year Student Support Services (SSS) grant from the U.S. Department of Education to help 140 disadvantaged students on the Armstrong and Liberty campuses succeed in their collegiate careers. This is the University’s second consecutive SSS grant.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
4 Georgia Tech athletes found to have COVID-19 in past week
By Ken Sugiura
In the past week, four Georgia Tech athletes tested positive for COVID-19, perhaps an indication of the increasing challenges of keeping Yellow Jackets athletes away from the coronavirus on a college campus. The four positive tests were reported in addition to three positive tests in the week before that previously were unreported. (The school initially reported that there were no positive tests in the period Aug. 10-24.) This past week, about 400 Tech students tested positive for COVID-19.
The Signal
Students cancel university housing contracts
By Hannah Jones
Small dorm rooms, roommate drama and crowded residence hall parties are classic images of the average college experience. This year, that is all in the past as students must navigate the murky waters of university housing through the COVID-19 pandemic. Sophomore Jalen Freeman considers his freshman year on-campus to have been “a great experience.” For him, life in Piedmont North brought many new friends and memorable experiences. In March, Freeman was quick to re-apply for housing, and he planned to move into another unit with his roommate. …According to Freeman, housing prices were released around late June or early July, and they were shockingly high. “Now, it’s fall, so we’re like, ‘What’s the plan, [Georgia State]?” he said. “We didn’t know about the pricing of housing until [recently], and then we learned the price of housing was double.” …Ultimately, Freeman decided to terminate his contract with University Housing. He cites the university’s lack of communication and new COVID-19 stipulations as the main influencers of his decision. Without much room for socializing and only one in-person class, the high cost of housing doesn’t seem worth it to Freeman.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
To further combat COVID, Georgia Tech will move students to single rooms
Get Schooled with Maureen Downey
Tech president tells families: Our data show that living in separate rooms can reduce the risk of infection
My twins attend different public colleges in Georgia, and their campuses are not on the same page in COVID-19 testing and protocols. Georgia Tech is taking it more seriously, too seriously at times according to some parents reaching out about the strict protocols and the dearth of social options for their students. That plaint comes mostly from parents of new Yellow Jackets, who did not have a social network in place before they arrived at the midtown campus three weeks ago. Those laments may increase after Tech President Ángel Cabrera announced today that students who share a dorm room will be moved into single rooms over the coming weeks. Many of those in a shared room – the traditional dorm rooms of old with beds on either side – are freshmen, and their roommates have in some cases become their social lifelines because so few opportunities for close-up human contact exist and so many classes went online. President Cabrera’s explanation: “While I realize many students would prefer not to live in single rooms, our data shows that living in separate rooms can reduce the risk of infection.”
WSB-TV
Clinical trials trying to get more diverse pool of people for COVID-19 vaccine
By: Jorge Estevez
There is a push underway to get more diversity in clinical studies for a COVID-19 vaccine. One of those trials is currently underway at Emory University. Channel 2 anchor Jorge Estevez spoke with Dr. Sharmon Osae from the University of Georgia about why it’s important to get more people involved and why some people may be hesitant to join the trial.
The Augusta Chronicle
New MCG faculty hires lead to federal research funding increase
By Tom Corwin
The Medical College of Georgia got a big bump in federal research funding through new recruits and is pursuing an ambitious statewide network that would touch every corner of Georgia, Dean David Hess said. It is also collaborating with providers in Albany on long-term studies on the lingering health effects of COVID-19 infections, he said. In the “critical” funding from the National Institutes of Health, MCG at Augusta University went from $52.7 million in 2019 to $65.2 million this year, a 19.1% increase, Hess said. “We’ve never been that high,” he said, and the school’s ranking among medical schools will likely climb from the 70s into perhaps the mid- to low 60s in NIH funding, which is one way to evaluate their reputations. Overall research funding went from $84.8 million to $104.8 million, Hess said. One big reason is an influx of new faculty with funding, particularly into the Department of Medicine, which went from 98 faculty to 128, although some of those were internal shifts, he said. Hess credits chairman Brian Annex, who started last August, with working with other chairs to bring in those key recruits and new funding.
The Red & Black
UGA students, psychologist discuss the pandemic’s effect on eating disorders
Emma Robinson | Assistant Culture Editor
While witnessing the tumultuous impact of the coronavirus pandemic and acts of social injustice erupting across the country, University of Georgia senior Tori Bigbee found herself becoming anxious and angry at the world. As a way to cope with her emotions, Bigbee turned to the one thing that she knew would give her instant comfort: food. Over the course of the pandemic, individuals with a past history of eating disorders noted concerns of relapse brought on by COVID-19 circumstances, according to a 2020 study published by the International Journal of Eating Disorders. …Laura McLain, licensed psychologist and site director at The Renfrew Center of Atlanta, works in serving individuals suffering from eating disorders, addictions and trauma. Renfrew’s Atlanta site also aims to particularly cater to college students and tailor treatments to fit their pertinent struggles, such as navigating dining halls and addressing body image and identity concerns. McLain said throughout the pandemic, college students have experienced a whole new level of isolation that could play a part in increased disordered behavior.
apnews
Decision on Augusta-area hospital license again appealed
Associated Press
A dispute over whether Augusta University can build a 100-bed hospital in the rapidly growing suburb of Columbia County is again headed back to the Georgia Supreme Court. The Augusta Chronicle reports that Doctors Hospital has filed a notice of appeal of a recent ruling by the Georgia Court of Appeals. That ruling found the state Department of Community Health acted appropriately in awarding a certificate of need to the Augusta University to build the hospital in 2014.
Coastal Courier
Georgia Trend Honors Parker’s Founder and CEO Greg Parker
Georgia Trend magazine honored Parker’s founder and CEO Greg Parker as a “Legacy Leader” in the September 2020 issue, published earlier today. To celebrate the magazine’s landmark 35th anniversary, Georgia Trend spotlighted 15 business leaders across the state who have made a long-term impact on their communities and on the state as a whole. “The [Parker’s] brand is synonymous with clean, friendly, profitable and philanthropic,” the article raves, citing Greg Parker’s $5 million gift to Georgia Southern University as well as the company’s $1 million endowment to the emergency and trauma center at Memorial University Hospital in Savannah, Ga. and ongoing Fueling the Community donations to support schools in Georgia and South Carolina. “Parker credits his ‘remarkable team’ for his success.”
Digital Journal
New Therapeutic Target for Sickle Cell Disease
An article published in Experimental Biology and Medicine (Volume 245, Issue 15, September 2020) (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1535370220945305) details a possible future treatment option for patients with sickle cell disease. The study, led by Drs. Xingguo Zhu and Betty S. Pace in the Division of Hematology/Oncology within the Department of Pediatrics at Augusta University in Augusta, GA, (USA), reports that NRF2, a transcription factor which controls oxidative stress in red blood cells, regulates globin gene expression.
The Augusta Chronicle
By Amanda King
CORRECTION: Previous versions of this article incorrectly stated Dr. Winkler’s job title. He is the chief of cardiovascular and thoracic radiology. The Chronicle regrets the error.
Dr. Michael Winkler says you can’t predict the future, but he thinks the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University is on its way to being one of the top medical schools in the country — and he plans to be a major part of that. The new chief of cardiovascular and thoracic radiology plans to enhance the use of 3D and 4D images that show patients what their issues are instead of using flat images on a screen. The images help to better explain medical complications and upcoming procedures to patients who might only have a high school education, he said. “If they have, for example, a congenital heart defect, we can show them the part that is healthy and the part that isn’t,” he said. “That gives them empowerment.” Those images will also help medical students and surgeons as they prepare for procedures.
WSB-TV
Gwinnett County seeking murder charges for dealers who sell drugs laced with fentanyl
By Tony Thomas
Joshua Elbaz said his family had no idea his brother Alex Elbaz struggled with an addiction to pain pills until a fateful day in February. “I was at school, and my father had texted me that he had walked in on Alex in his bedroom. And he was unresponsive,” Joshua Elbaz recalled. Alex Elbaz, 20, just three months from graduating from Georgia Gwinnett College, died of an overdose. Tests later revealed that the painkillers he had taken were laced with fentanyl.
Other News:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia governor weighs more changes to state’s coronavirus rules
By Greg Bluestein
Kemp doesn’t want to ‘start shutting things down again’
Gov. Brian Kemp hasn’t made many major changes to Georgia’s coronavirus restrictions for much of the summer. Now he’s monitoring the return of students to schools and college campuses to decide whether to relax more regulations. “We still have areas that we’re concerned about,” he said. “We still have college kids that haven’t been on campus three or four weeks yet. We still have schools that are opening after Labor Day. So we want to be very cautious, watching another two weeks, and then we’ll see where we go from there.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia demands $22,434 for COVID-19 records, says they’ll be ready next spring
By David Wickert
State officials want to charge $22,434 for public records that could shed light on Georgia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The estimated bill — submitted to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution — dwarfs previous charges for comparable records sought by the newspaper in recent months. The highest previous bill was $1,884. The Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency also informed the AJC that it will take about 34 weeks to produce the records. So emails written between June 17 and Aug. 12 would be available in the spring of 2021. Previous records have been provided in six weeks or less.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Third coronavirus vaccine in US final testing stage
By Lauran Neergaard and Carla K. Johnson, Associated Press
A handful of the dozens of experimental COVID-19 vaccines in human testing have reached the last and biggest hurdle, looking for the needed proof that they really work as a U.S. advisory panel suggested Tuesday a way to ration the first limited doses once a vaccine wins approval. AstraZeneca announced Monday its vaccine candidate has entered the final testing stage in the U.S. The Cambridge, England-based company said the study will involve up to 30,000 adults from various racial, ethnic and geographic groups. Two other vaccine candidates began final testing this summer in tens of thousands of people in the U.S. One was created by the National Institutes of Health and manufactured by Moderna Inc., and the other developed by Pfizer Inc. and Germany’s BioNTech.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Experts: viral report on COVID-19 toll flawed
By Ariel Hart and J. Scott Trubey
Contributing conditions important, but COVID-19 killed patients
A flawed news report on CDC death counts from COVID-19 whipped through social media Monday, seized on by thousands who thought the data revealed a truth they had long suspected: that nearly all people counted as dying of COVID-19 were actually sick with something else to begin with. Only, that wasn’t the truth. Experts say the news headlines and posts attributing almost all deaths to underlying conditions were based on a faulty read of the CDC data. That didn’t stop the social media engine. An anti-vaccination filmmaker garnered thousands of likes upon tweeting the misleading story, saying that if people were surprised, then they hadn’t been paying attention to his TV show. A Florida state representative claimed the story was blacked out by a “corrupt media.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Map: Coronavirus deaths and cases in Georgia (updated Sept. 1, 3 p.m.)
An updated count of coronavirus deaths and cases reported across the state
DEATHS: 5,733 | Deaths have been confirmed in 157 counties. County is determined by the patient’s residence, when known, not by where they were treated.
CONFIRMED CASES: 272,697 | Cases have been confirmed in every county.
Higher Education News:
Inside Higher Ed
U of California Barred From Considering SAT/ACT Scores
Preliminary injunction cites impact of testing on students with disabilities.
By Scott Jaschik
A California judge on Monday issued a preliminary injunction barring University of California campuses from considering SAT or ACT scores in admissions or financial aid decisions. While the ruling is not permanent, the judge indicated that the plaintiffs bringing the suit — a coalition of organizations serving low-income and minority Californians — are likely to prevail. The ruling is the latest development in the battle over standardized tests in admissions, and it appears to represent a significant victory for critics of testing. That is because the ruling came after the University of California Board of Regents voted, in May, to approve a five-year plan to phase out the use of the SAT and ACT. In the first two years of that plan, the university system was to be test optional, meaning applicants could continue to submit scores, but they didn’t have to. Now the university system must be test blind, meaning that no student can submit a test score.
Inside Higher Ed
Moody’s: Auxiliary Revenue in Danger, but College Bond Defaults Remain Unlikely
By Rick Seltzer
Bond payment defaults are unlikely in higher education, even as more universities retreat to online and hybrid learning this fall because of the coronavirus and in doing so risk revenue declines from auxiliary services like parking and dormitories, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Some colleges might miss debt service coverage covenants, the ratings agency said in a new report. But universities can reduce expenses, borrow internally and use reserves to repay debts, or they can refinance to lower payments in the immediate future. Those that have borrowed heavily to pay for auxiliary facilities and that use money generated by those facilities to repay debt are under the most pressure.
Inside Higher Ed
COVID-19 Roundup: White House Advice on Sick Students; More Fall Pivots
Citing rising cases and worries, Lock Haven and Hartwick suspend in-person instruction for two weeks, and Colorado College goes virtual for 2020.
By Doug Lederman
The Trump administration is offering colleges plenty of advice on various aspects of the coronavirus epidemic — from how to handle potentially infected students to their approach to playing football. Tuesday also brought another boomlet of colleges and universities altering their fall plans, with two colleges announcing that they would provide all virtual instruction throughout the semester and two more moving to entirely virtual courses for at least two weeks, all citing increases in COVID-19 cases or the number of quarantined students. And looking further ahead, at least two community colleges have already said they will hold some or most of their spring courses online, as well.
Inside Higher Ed
With pivots, lockdowns and outbreaks occurring at campuses around the country, will students continue to trust their colleges?
By Lilah Burke
This fall term, though it has barely begun, has been one of the most chaotic in decades for colleges and students. Many colleges and universities around the country have changed their plans for in-person classes days before — or even after — the term has begun. Some have brought students back to campus, only to quickly struggle with outbreaks and infections. … Research has shown that students vastly prefer a semester in person, with some saying they would be unlikely to return for remote learning. But whether students and families will continue to trust institutions that have brought them to campus, only to send them back and forth across the country, lock them in their dorms, or allow them to get sick, remains to be seen. Observers say students may end up feeling that their colleges were less than honest. The most recent polling, conducted in early August, shows that most students then believed their institutions were looking out for them and handling the situation well.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
How 3 Colleges Are Using Student ‘Ambassadors’ to Enforce Social Distancing
By Alison Berg
As many colleges and universities welcome students back to campus for the fall, some have seen big outbreaks of Covid-19. While several have blamed the outbreaks on students who violate social-distancing guidelines, others have deployed students to help enforce the rules. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, for example, has hired teams of student “public-health ambassadors” to enforce Covid-19 regulations among their classmates. “If we’re going to be successful in preventing them [outbreaks] from happening, it has to be peers working with peers,” said Laura Blake Jones, the university’s dean of students. Ambassadors work in teams of two to three people, including both students and staff members, on four-hour shifts. They walk around the most populous areas of campus and remind students to wear masks and socially distance.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Covid-19 Is Threatening the In-Person Semester. Can Wastewater Testing Help Save It?
By Nell Gluckman
When Ian Pepper finally found traces of the coronavirus in one of the sewage samples his lab had been collecting all over the University of Arizona campus, he felt a jolt of excitement. …With help from the university’s facilities team, members of Pepper’s lab had been testing wastewater flushed out of dorms and other campus buildings, and gathered from manholes, for months. Last Tuesday a positive test showed up in a sample taken from outside a dorm. …Now they had to act. Pepper, an environmental-science professor, reported the positive test. Around 11 p.m. that night, he was awakened by a call from Robert C. Robbins, the president, who wanted to talk about next steps. The next day, Pepper’s team tested the wastewater from the dorm in question — Likins Hall — five more times, and each time they found the virus. Next the students who live in Likins were given individual tests; two tested positive for Covid-19, Pepper said. Those two were quarantined elsewhere. The effluvium from Likins Hall has been negative ever since. Wastewater testing, or surveillance, may prove to be an important tool in detecting and stopping coronavirus outbreaks — at a time when campuses need all the help they can get. …As more students return to more colleges, sewage testing may be a welcome bright spot.
Inside Higher Ed
Without reliable revenue from student housing, dining and athletic programs, colleges are facing steep budget shortfalls and implementing additional furloughs.
By Emma Whitford
The beginning of September marked the start of long-term furloughs for many colleges. After widespread budget slashing and subsequent furloughs in April, a second wave of revenue shortfalls is sweeping colleges as they attempt to safely reopen for in-person classes and, in some cases, abruptly reverse course. …Typically, about 60 percent of college spending goes toward salaries and personnel, according to Ken Rodgers, director at S&P Global. This makes it difficult to slim down budgets without cutting into employee paychecks, even after implementing hiring freezes, eliminating travel spending and halting retirement contributions. Many colleges took those one-time actions last spring to stave off personnel cuts and are left with few cost-cutting options this fall. …Athletics programs, a moneymaker for many big universities, are also facing significant revenue losses this fall. Many athletic conferences, including the Big Ten and Pac-12, have postponed or canceled the fall season.
Inside Higher Ed
CIC Report Reviews States’ Tuition-Free College Programs
By Emma Whitford
Several years after three states implemented tuition-free college programs, the Council of Independent Colleges released a new report Monday examining the early effects of each program. The Tennessee Promise and Oregon Promise programs, which guarantee tuition-free admission to public community colleges in the state, increased community college enrollment in their respective states significantly, the report states. That said, it’s too early to tell whether that enrollment boost will contribute to an increase in college credentials awarded. New York’s Excelsior program — for students attending both two- and four-year programs — has benefited fewer students than originally predicted, and many students have been terminated from the program after failing to maintain full-time status, the report states. This could change in the future alongside the program’s eligibility ceiling, which increased last year to annual family income of $125,000. The CIC report points to Washington State as a model for college affordability policies.