Healthy enrollment expected at UHC for fall 2020

University president Dr. Stanton McNeely said his faculty and staff have worked diligently over the summer to fine-tune teaching and safety protocols, so that returning students can focus on continuing their education, no matter how the pandemic plays out.
    

McNeely said the university was “on pace” to have a similar enrollment to last fall’s student ranks of about 1,100. Registration continues through late August.
    

“One of those things with the University of Holy Cross is that our faculty know our students by name; our classes are small; we have a 10:1 student-to-teacher ratio,” McNeely said. “That personal attention by faculty and students helped us significantly when we had to transition during (last spring’s) stay-home order.”
    

McNeely said the university lost just one student between mid-March and the end of the semester. During that difficult spring, the Zoom platform enabled students and teachers of UHC’s already-small classes to interact and ask questions.
    

As for the fall, the university will move to online-only classes after Thanksgiving for the remainder of the semester, to avoid risks from holiday travel.
 

Summer is providing insight
    

This summer, UHC has continued to conduct courses online with very few exceptions – a few in-person labs that were deliberately delayed until July. Fall will bring a stepped-up mix of remote and in-person instruction, with hands-on lessons in the biological and physical sciences, nursing and health sciences being conducted in person; whereas, courses in disciplines such as business will remain online, McNeely said.
    

“That hands-on piece is an important element of instruction, but we want to do so safely and responsibly,” he said, adding that larger rooms will be assigned to in-person classes, to reduce density.
    

The summer semester offered “practice” for fall in another important way: access to the physical campus was restricted to faculty and staff only – from 9 a.m. to noon, Monday through Thursday. McNeely said this helped UHC administrators to prepare for the stringent protocols all campus visitors will face in the fall: every person will be required to wear a mask; sign in at a single entry point (Security Gate C); and have his or her temperature taken before entering campus.
    

McNeely said the sign-in requirement will enable the university to deploy housekeeping staff to campus spaces that are used on a given day and to do the important work of contact tracing, if needed.
     

“If a case (of COVID-19) does arise, we can look at who else was on campus that day and all the possibilities,” McNeely explained. 
The allure of being smaller
    

The university is finalizing plans to resume food services through its vendor, Stage Dining, and the safest use of common areas such as the library, café, break rooms and Academic Skills Center, which all remained closed over the summer. Another priority has been to create less density in the four-story residence hall.
    

“All rooms will be private rooms,” McNeely said. “Fortunately, because our residence hall is relatively new, the vast majority of our rooms (also) have private bathrooms.” 
    

As registration continues, McNeely and his staff are receiving calls from students indicating that they are considering staying closer to home this fall. UHC’s low student-teacher ratio, paired with its residential hall roominess, are looking increasingly attractive to students who might have attended a state university alongside tens of thousands of students, McNeely said.
    

“We are seeing students interested in the University of Holy Cross from the New Orleans area and southeast Louisiana who were at institutions out of state, pre-COVID, and who are now looking at us for the fall,” he said.
    

In other student news, the CARES Act Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund – federal funding that offered emergency grant funds to eligible students who experienced a financial hardship caused by the disruption of campus operations last spring due to COVID-19 – enabled UHC to disburse $236,300 in financial aid grants to 748 students – a large percentage of spring’s 1,147 enrollees, McNeely said.
    

“I couldn’t be more proud of our faculty and staff – and students especially, because we have gone through a time of very big change since the outbreak occurred, and at the same time, they have been fully engaged and very highly adaptive,” he said. “That goes back to the mission of our founders, the Marianites of Holy Cross: to be a prophetic presence in an ever-changing world. That’s what we continue to be!”
    

For more information, visit www.uhcno.edu.