"The vaccine offers a path back to economic stability for many campuses"
"Vaccines are on the horizon, but most college students and workers are at the back of the line to get them" by Deirdre Fernandes Globe Staff, December 21, 2020
Consider yourselves lucky.
College students have been among the most frequently tested in Massachusetts for COVID, but they may be among the last to get vaccinated against the illness.
Why would they need to be given a jab given the chart regarding the infection fatality rate?
Colleges and universities, a major economic engine in Massachusetts, are hoping to have enough students, faculty, and staff vaccinated by next August to resume normal campus life at the start of the school year, but how they will get there remains uncertain, relies heavily on state and federal guidance and potential mandates on vaccinations, and is likely to be chaotic, college officials said.
Once again they are holding out false promises for life is never going back to normal unless the kids rebel en masse against the tyranny based on lies. They have the most to lose.
“There’s a lot of work to do,” said Martin Meehan, president of the University of Massachusetts system. “There’s so much uncertainty around the vaccines.”
Like whether they are safe or effective because we are being told they won't prevent you from becoming infected or transmitting the alleged viru$, and yet the hack Meehan wants to build a vaccination corps of college kids to reopen America.
Colleges and universities were not given priority under Governor Charlie Baker’s massive, public vaccination plan unveiled Dec. 9. The state has included most university students and workers in the third tier of its vaccine distribution plan along with the general public. The Phase 3 group, with an estimated 2.8 million Massachusetts residents, is expected to have access to the two-shot dose of the vaccine in April at the earliest. It is unclear whether students will be expected to get their shots where they go to college and whether universities will receive vaccine doses to distribute to their students and employees, much like they handled their own virus testing programs.
Universities said they are trying to identify members of their communities who may qualify for vaccinations in the first and second groups, including clinical and non-clinical health care workers who are dealing directly with COVID patients; campus police; and those providing emergency or medical services on campus. Faculty and staff who are 65 and older and students with conditions that put them at higher risk of serious illness or complications from COVID-19 also could be vaccinated earlier.
Nearly half if not more are experiencing what they call vaccine hesitancy.
With a mostly young and healthy student population and a limited supply of vaccine doses, governors have not made special accommodations for vaccinating college students.
In Massachusetts, the first to be vaccinated are front-line health workers, senior care residents, public safety employees, home-based caregivers and other health workers, and residents of congregate settings such as prisons and homeless shelters. The state anticipates their vaccinations will be completed by February.
If the state can obtain additional supplies, Massachusetts would move on to inoculating residents with two or more chronic health conditions, critical workers such as teachers, transit employees, food and sanitation workers, adults 65 and over, and residents with a single serious illness.
Other states have similar distribution plans and most assume that college students, faculty, and staff will get vaccinated at the same time as the general public, said Chris Marsicano, an assistant professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and founding director of the College Crisis Initiative, which has been tracking higher education’s response to the pandemic.
If colleges are able to receive their own vaccine supply to distribute, it would likely happen during that final phase from April to June and there could be lobbying in the coming months from various higher education trade groups, Marsicano said, as schools jockey to be first in line.
For example, many community colleges have been hit hard by the pandemic and many of their students are parents of school-age children, or work in the service sector. The sooner these students are vaccinated, the sooner the local economy will be up and running, Marsicano said.
These terroristic threats are like extortion and blackmail.
For the fall semester, many colleges tried to curb the spread of COVID-19 and keep their students, faculty, and neighbors safe by testing students at least once a week, but some campuses didn’t have access to laboratories, couldn’t afford extensive testing programs, or were in states where large-scale testing was not a priority.
Outside New England, many large public schools have done little testing and have struggled to keep infection rates down on campuses. That could spur lawmakers and public health officials in those states to give these institutions priority access to the vaccines to prevent the virus from spreading, penalizing private colleges that spent millions on testing programs that reduced coronavirus cases, Marsicano said.
“This vaccine issue is going to be another source of cleavage and division in the higher education lobbying,” he said. “Vaccine distribution could be more chaotic than testing.”
Meanwhile, institutions around Massachusetts are beginning to pivot their planning efforts from testing to vaccinations.
They mean Northeastern, Tufts, and UMass.
Related:
"The loss of housing and dining revenue during the coronavirus pandemic is the major reason the five-campus University of Massachusetts system is facing a projected $335 million budget shortfall, officials said Wednesday. System President Marty Meehan told a trustees committee that it will be critical for the university to remain disciplined in its financial management to remain financially sound. Of the $335 million projected deficit, a projected $235 million is from a loss in housing and dining revenue because most students are learning remotely and not living on campus. University Treasurer Lisa Calise told the Committee on Administration and Finance that the system has adjusted its projections to include $76 million more in state funding; $21 million more in tuition and fees from better than expected enrollment; $80 million less in housing and dining revenue; and $19 million in expenses for coronavirus safety initiatives. Trustees at Meehan’s recommendation, have frozen tuition rates for in-state undergraduate and graduate students this year, dropping a planned 2.5% increase that would have generated nearly $15 million. The system has campuses in Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell and a medical school in Worcester (AP)."
Boston-area colleges said they are also consulting with their legal teams about whether they can require students and employees on campus to be vaccinated, but many are hoping that the state will mandate the vaccine.
If past precedent is any indication, they will.
If COVID vaccines are available to colleges to distribute to students in late spring before they return home, states will have to make sure their immunization registries are updated and accessible by health officials in other states, Taylor said.
See where this is going?
Students may end up getting one shot in the state where they attend college and need the follow-up dose a few weeks later in the state where their family lives, she said.
While the availability of a vaccine is unlikely to help colleges or their budgets for this academic year, many are hopeful that it will help reduce their losses next year.
In December, the credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service projected that higher education revenue will decline by 5 percent to 10 percent over the next year as universities grapple with pandemic-related shocks, including the losses from lower enrollment and empty dorm rooms.
Many colleges nationwide have laid off or furloughed employees and are looking to eliminate long-running but low-enrollment academic majors and reduce protected tenured faculty. Some colleges also are looking to merge with financially stronger partners to survive.
The vaccine offers a path back to economic stability for many campuses, college officials said.
“We are all trying to get up and running as soon as possible, and do it competently,” Meehan said.
If not, the “bu$ine$$ model is not sustainable” and he will have to sell the condo.
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I truly wish you kids had a good Thanksgiving despite the faulty and flawed test that does not specifically detect the yet to be isolated COVID-19 (how can you vaccinate for a virus you haven't isolated) and turns up positives for non-infectious individuals depending on the cycle magnification of genetic material, and the fear generated when there is no data to support it.
So despite the positive vaccine news, there is still plenty of cause for concern, what with long lines to get tested reappearing across the United States — a reminder that the nation’s strained testing system remains unable to keep pace with the coronavirus as the country braces for winter weather, flu season, and holiday travel with victory in sight.
You ready for your test?
"From campus, a lesson in controlling the virus; Massachusetts colleges have been the rare success in combatting the spread of coronavirus. The state could learn from their extensive testing plans" by Deirdre Fernandes Globe Staff, November 28, 2020
The return of tens of thousands of college students to Massachusetts from all corners of the US and world, once feared as a super-spreading provocation, has instead proved to be one of the few successes of the pandemic, thanks to an extensive testing system that could serve as a model for the rest of society.
The immense undertaking by many New England colleges and universities included testing students when they first arrived on campus, requiring them to wear face masks and limit social gatherings, and, throughout the fall, making everyone on campus undergo a nose swab test for COVID-19 at least once a week.
It's very painful, may draw blood, and comes terrifyingly close to something called the Cribriform plate that is very close to the brain. No such procedure is needed to test for the dreaded COVID, but the Food and Drug Administration has authorized the first direct to consumer test for COVID-19, allowing Americans to take their own nasal swab and send the sample in for lab testing without a prescription so carry on … and on … and on … as COVID-19 surges and those nasal swabs soldiers on and switch to shorter swabs rather than the longer ones known as “brain ticklers.”
With several thousand students on many of the state’s college campuses, higher education institutions have conducted more than 2.8 million COVID tests since Aug. 15, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The result is an infection rate among college students that is significantly lower than among the broader population in the state.
“It is a pretty good miniature blueprint of what we should be doing as a society,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Frequent, rapid turnaround testing . . . that should absolutely be replicated at the societal scale.”
That’s a sharp contrast to the view back in August, when many — neighbors, local officials, and faculty — were dubious of plans by dozens of New England colleges and universities to bring students back to campus amid a global pandemic. Indeed, outbreaks of the virus early in the fall semester, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Providence College, and among athletes at Boston College, seemed to bear the skeptics out.
Whatever happened to those kids anyway?
Now, replicating the stout prevention efforts on a broad scale in communities and businesses, specialists say, would take money, planning, and a collective willpower that Massachusetts has yet to harness and deploy.
Indeed, months into the pandemic, easily accessible widespread testing, with quick results, is still not in place in Massachusetts, despite calls from health experts and business groups since late spring to ramp up testing.
“Money certainly helps, but the biggest single ingredient isn’t money, it’s commitment,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
It's always the same old criminal experts that the Globe cites.
Central to the campus successes was the decision to partner with a powerful local resource: the Broad Institute in Cambridge, a research collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
Since its launch in 2004, Broad has been at the forefront of cutting edge genome and gene-editing research, but this past March, as COVID-19 cases skyrocketed and hospitals and the state’s public health laboratory found themselves ill-equipped to deal with the crisis, the Broad expanded into virus testing. It used a $10 million state grant and federal funding to build capacity for as many as 100,000 tests a day.
It will be never ending testing, and you will have to do it before leaving the house.
It's a dystopian nightmare with the promise of normalcy.
After sending students home in mid-March as the virus swept across Massachusetts, local college presidents, many with science backgrounds, began to develop plans to reopen schools in the fall, with quick and affordable testing as a key component.
They approached the Broad, which offered to charge colleges $25 per test — much less than the $100 commercial price — and promised results within 24 hours. The Broad has conducted more than 6 million tests since late March; it has previously estimated that nearly two-thirds of the 70,000 tests it processes on average each day are from colleges and universities.
Meanwhile, a handful of institutions, including two of the largest — Boston University and Northeastern University — spent millions building their own testing laboratories.
They are all going broke but have millions to invest in the testing tyranny!
As a result, the seven-day weighted average positive test rate in Massachusetts higher education has never exceeded 0.37 percent this fall, whereas the statewide positive test rate has passed 3 percent in recent days. (The positive test rate is the number of positive tests divided by the number of total tests administered.)
Can you do math, kids?
“Regular testing across the whole campus community is really essential to success,” said Laurie Leshin, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who led the state’s task force on college reopening. “The testing was really critical. . . . It’s not a secret formula.”
Maybe if you pooling the COVID-19 testing can help keep the kids in school, which will benefit the social, emotional, and academic development of children as well as create conditions to fully activate the workforce and give them all a boost of morale.
Contrast that with scenes of residents waiting hours in long lines in the cold at free state testing sites ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, or the lengthy delays in getting results that make the tests far less useful. Public school systems have struggled to bring students back to classrooms in the fall, while businesses have been reluctant to bring workers back to office buildings, crippling the restaurants and retailers that rely on them for their livelihoods, and many lower-wage employees who have little choice but to return to work have felt unsafe and at higher risk of contracting the virus.
The lack of direction and resources from all levels of government has accelerated the damage to the economy and cost lives, said Jha, the Brown University dean. Public K-12 schools may not need the extensive testing colleges conducted, but quick spot or sample testing of younger students and teachers could have allowed administrators to isolate those at risk and keep the virus from spreading rampantly through the school community. If there had been more funding and organization for such efforts, more students could have returned to the classroom, Jha said.
All the science they claim to worship suggest that schools and kids are not a vector for transmission but that doesn't fit the narrative so it is omitted or ignored, and the government gave plenty of direction -- just the wrong way.
Last week, during a virtual panel of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, business leaders said a coordinated national testing strategy matching companies with laboratories would have lessened the economic fallout from the pandemic and allowed more people to remain employed while working safely.
Still, the high cost of testing and the slow turnaround for results have been deterrents for businesses, too, said Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Chan School who has consulted with colleges and CEOs on reopening plans and is a vocal advocate for rapid antigen tests.
The antigen tests have not been as accurate as the molecular tests, but they can be distributed more widely and offer faster results, but the federal government has been slow to approve their broad use; meanwhile, public funding for increased testing in schools has stalled in Congress, and within Massachusetts, Northeastern University epidemiologist Samuel Scarpino said, there should have been more effort by Governor Charlie Baker’s administration to expand testing. “We never made the decision as a state. We just decided that we couldn’t afford it,” Scarpino said.
State officials, however, point to the $10 million investment in Broad in the spring to boost testing capacity and Baker’s announcement earlier in November to roll out quick turnaround tests to 134 public school districts, charters, and special education collaboratives in early December. These tests will be used to screen K-12 students and staff who show COVID-19 symptoms.
“Massachusetts leads the nation in COVID-19 testing efforts and has invested over $150 million in testing statewide as a public good for employers, businesses, long term care facilities, higher education, and the public,” said Kate Reilly, a spokeswoman for the COVID-19 Response Command Center, yet experts say Massachusetts should have acted more quickly, as colleges did. School presidents said they had to move fast, with little guidance from federal health officials, and while it has cost them millions of dollars, some schools have big endowments to help fund the efforts, and others used federal stimulus money or passed the costs on to students through added fees.
“This is a decision every employer and every business made for themselves,” said Boston University president Bob Brown. BU initially pegged its annual costs for COVID testing and safety measures at about $70 million, although Brown said it will likely be lower because the testing was less expensive than anticipated.
“We believe very much in the residential environment for the kind of educational experience we give and we wanted to open it,” Brown said. “We made the commitment to do that. Just like any segment of society, you decide how much money are you willing to spend to supply what you do.”
A former Budweiser beer distribution center in Cambridge has served as the epicenter of the region’s college testing program. The squat, block-long building is home to the Broad’s Genomic Platform laboratory, where tens of thousands of polymerase-chain-reaction, or PCR, tests are processed daily.
In the evenings, couriers from around New England deliver vials of swab tests to be analyzed overnight. The institute also processes tests for nursing homes and the state’s Stop the Spread testing sites. The Broad said the federal and state funding allowed it to reduce the costs of testing.
While the college program began with a handful of private colleges, it has grown to 108 institutions, from small schools such as Regis and Lasell colleges to Middlebury College in Vermont, Framingham State University, and Yale University in Connecticut.
The Broad set up a vast international supply network for testing materials that only occasionally has showed signs of strain: In October, a package of plastic tips used in testing machines en route from China was briefly delayed because shippers were busy delivering the new iPhone 12 models, said Stacey Gabriel, senior director of the Genomics Platform, who heads the testing program, and while the Broad lab can conduct 100,000 tests a day, it has tipped over that high mark just twice so far.
The institute also had logistical issues, such as getting test samples to Cambridge efficiently. Broad hired a courier service that fans out messengers daily across eight different routes. Gabriel said the institute also has a call center that handles thousands of inquiries a day about forgotten passwords and test results.
Outside of New England, the response to the coronavirus pandemic has led to different solutions and mixed results.
Some institutions, including Duke University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have also set up extensive testing programs of their own. Other universities test only students with symptoms. Many other institutions, however, chose not to bring back students and are offering courses remote-only.
The cost of testing and the conversion of lab space into COVID testing facilities are hurdles but can be overcome, said Leshin, the WPI president.
“What we did at the Broad, it’s not rocket science,” Leshin said. “It could be done regionally across the country. You could build these kinds of labs all over the country; there’s literally nothing preventing it. It’s the will. The initial capital investment was important, but just as important was the commitment of [Broad] to figuring out the process and making it work.”
The Broad is now in discussions with some public K-12 school systems about conducting more affordable group testing. A pilot between Tufts University and Medford and Somerville public schools is set to launch in January.
They traced two outbreaks back to Medford.
Northeastern is also in discussions with businesses and local health centers to take on some of the testing load.
Public health experts said that despite promising news this month, vaccines will be unavailable to most of the public for months to come, meaning frequent testing will remain key to keeping communities safe.
“People have the impression that there is enough testing,” said Jared Auclair, an associate dean at Northeastern who heads its testing lab. “There’s not.”
What are they really testing for, or is it a test at all?
What if COVID is simply a cover for medical authorities to collect your DNA for profile?
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College kids usually leave behind a legacy of powerful protest, but they have been kept in the dark this holiday season as the virus surges and leaves families in dire straits at Christmas.
It's all in the eyes of the beholder, I suppose. It's the thrill of the hunt in the neighborhood in a time of need that will dazzle you with some holiday cheer. Taking a browse at the graffiti that has been scrubbed clean should make the apartment more appealing, especially if you are white.
Thus, as twin brothers struggle to adjust to college in a time of pandemic, it has never been a better time to carol the song Oh Christmas tree by the book and wish you were back in high school:
"Nearly a quarter of Boston public high school students not logging into classes daily as course failure rates rise" by James Vaznis Globe Staff, December 12, 2020
Nearly a quarter of Boston public high school students did not log into classes on any given day this fall as schools remain closed and course failure rates rise, according to school data released Saturday that paints a worrisome picture of academic disengagement.
Black and Latino students experienced the biggest increases.
School officials unveiled the data as part of a new pandemic dashboard to track a host of student performance measures during the public health crisis, which has raised concerns about educational inequality widening as nearly all students are learning at home, where access to technology, parental support, and other resources varies widely.
Parents are damned if they do, damned if they don't. You keep the kid home and they suffer, you send them to school and they are in the state's clutches.
The data also include the first concrete insight into the pandemic’s effects on last spring’s high school graduates: Just 53 percent of them enrolled in college this fall, down sharply from the previous year.
Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said the data reflect a variety of issues students are confronting at home on a daily basis, from feelings of isolation and deteriorating mental health and sometimes the need to help with household finances and chores.
“We will continue to watch and intervene with students and do everything we can to make sure they get what they need,” Cassellius said in an interview Saturday, calling it a moral imperative.
Can you believe that contradictory flop falling out of her mouth?
It was nearly unanimous, with 97.5 percent of membership agreeing.
The data, presented at a six-hour School Committee meeting Saturday, provide the most comprehensive window yet this fall into remote learning in the state’s largest school system as traditional classrooms remain closed to nearly all of the system’s 51,000 students. Overall, about 86 percent of students districtwide in kindergarten through grade 12 are going online each day for learning, but exam schools, such as Boston Latin Academy and the John D. O’Bryant, both had daily online participation rates below 80 percent as well as traditional high schools such as Brighton High, Excel, and Charlestown High.
More than 16,000 students are enrolled in the city’s approximately three dozen high schools, while almost 4,000 students each day are not clicking into classes or getting their assignments. The data captures only those students who use their school-issued e-mail accounts to log into one of the district’s learning and communication platforms, which includes Gmail, Google Classroom, Google Meet, Google Drive, and Clever.
School officials contend that the online activity does not reflect all the learning taking place, noting that many are studying offline via hands-on projects, particularly in the arts and sciences. When factoring in those activities, school officials say the system’s overall daily attendance rate for all students is 89.9 percent — 3 percentage points lower than last school year before the pandemic shutdown classrooms, and they stressed that student engagement is far more robust this fall than it was in the spring, when only 51 percent of students logged in daily, while the daily attendance rate, including offline activity, was 83 percent.
That's because there are no more snow days.
Amrita Dani, who teaches humanities and English as a second language at Boston Adult Technical Academy in Bay Village, said her students — many of whom are recent immigrants between 18 and 22 — are struggling with unreliable Internet service and other technological issues.
“We are helping them to trouble shoot, dropping off Wi-Fi hot spot kits to them, and getting on the phone with Comcast with them,” she said, noting that she and other teachers are also meeting with their students in person in pandemic safe spots, like front porches. “When the Internet quality is low and students get kicked off every three minutes, they get frustrated.”
Many parents say they have reached breaking points with remote instruction and worry that their children are not learning as much as they would in a classroom.
Time to fight for your children and turn back the COVID tyranny.
Tashani Strother, whose 6-year-old daughter attends kindergarten and 9-year-old daughter is in the third grade, expressed frustration that classrooms remain closed and said it is creating mounting financial hardship. To oversee her children’s education at home, Strother said she had to quit her job as a server at Dunkin.
While she appreciates that school officials are making free school meals available for pickup at distribution sites, she says she has no time to get there because online learning in her small apartment goes on from 8:45 a.m. to 4:10 p.m.
She said she also must buy supplies that typically would be provided by the schools, especially for science and art projects. Her girls have already gone though nearly 30 notebooks since the beginning of the school year.
“It’s hard all the way across the board,” she said. “I feel like BPS could be doing a better job for our children period.”
Danielle Sheehan said it is a constant struggle to get her 6-year-old son to sit down in front of his computer for kindergarten classes because he finds it anxiety-inducing and stressful. Her son has disabilities, including attention deficit disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and severe sensory disorders.
“He gets stomachaches before going on. He doesn’t like being on camera,” she said. “His teacher is working extremely hard to cater to him and his needs. The problem is the way he has to learn.”
How many prescriptions is he on?
The data comes amid growing concern that classroom closures statewide may be inflicting academic and mental harm to countless students — some of it due to students’ lack of daily connection with teachers and classmates.
If they cared, they never would have went along with this fraud and would call it out!
In an effort to address that, state Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley on Tuesday will ask the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to approve several “emergency regulations” that will set a minimum amount of live instruction when students are learning remotely. If approved, districts and schools conducting all learning remotely must provide live instruction to students every day.
They are going to be ordered into school even as mayors in some of the region’s biggest cities — including Boston, Brockton, Lynn, Newton, and Somerville — have agreed to close down gyms, museums, movie theaters, and other aspects of their battered economies as rising infection rates force officials to roll back their tentative steps toward normalcy, and it's no secret that a spike in coronavirus infections since Thanksgiving is straining the state’s health care system.
In Boston, fewer than 200 students with profound disabilities are receiving in-person instruction at four of the district’s 125 schools. On Monday, the district plans to open an additional 28 schools for 1,700 students with significant needs. School officials said they hope to bring back more students after the holiday break, depending upon COVID-19 infection rates.
Jessica Tang, president of the Boston Teachers Union, said she was surprised daily attendance didn’t decline more than it did. “I truly do think it’s a reflection of how hard educators are working to connect with students not only for their academics but also their social-emotional needs,” said Tang, who also praised parents for helping their children with remote learning.
It remains unclear whether the shift to remote learning is causing more students to quit school, but one key barometer is encouraging: The volume of students being tracked by the school system’s re-engagement center, which convinces dropouts to go back to school, is about the same this fall as it was last fall, roughly 700 students, said Neil Sullivan, executive director of the Boston Private Industry Council, which helps run the center.
“It wasn’t like we were doing well with all students before pandemic — it’s a preexisting condition,” Sullivan said, but he added the question now is “how do we use the crisis to come out in a better place to support them.”
Yeah, don't let it go waste as someone once said!
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What they are going to do is mandate expanded instructional requirements and force some low-income families to choose either a free meal or to attend class as school officials release a timeline for returning to in-person school in early 2021 because the “health and well-being of our young people needs to continue to be our No. 1 focus,” according to Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh.
Related:
St. Mary's Maiya Bergdorf blocks Marina Greaney's path on a drive to the basket (Josh Reynolds for The Boston Globe)
Looks like some tough low post play, and sadly, it's the same for the boys:
"Outside of mask wearing, the other tangible in-game differences were the lack of a jump-ball — substituted by a pregame coin toss — and only two players in the key on a free-throw attempt. Inbound plays under the basket are also eliminated and replaced by an inbound from the sideline; however, there was still tight man-to-man defense, boxing out, and play designs....."
Of course, they have put youth sports on ice for the time being, and even the Hockey East men’s opener between No. 2-ranked Boston College and New Hampshire scheduled for Friday night at Conte Forum was postponed after a member of the UNH program had an inconclusive COVID-19 test during this unsettled college hockey season.
Time to hit the books:
"Textbook publishers had been trying to shift from paper to digital for years. Then along came the COVID-19 pandemic, giving many reluctant educators and students the nudge they needed to make the leap to online course materials. What was once a traditional book-publishing business has been evolving into a software business. The pandemic hasn’t been easy on these companies, by any means, [but] the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of online learning. The digital shift has enabled publishers to realize the potential of previous investments, either in acquisitions of education-tech startups or in interactive software developed in-house. Not everyone is enthused about this shift. Emily Vitale, a junior at Fitchburg State University and the local chapter chair for MassPIRG, said she finds it easier to learn by going through a textbook and marking important passages with a highlighter, rather than doing the same thing on a screen, in part because she can avoid the distractions that pop up on her computer or phone. Tim Bozik, global product president at major textbook publisher Pearson, said the profit margins for print textbooks and digital ones, at least at his company, are roughly comparable, but there are significant benefits for publishers to make the digital shift, including developing direct relationships with consumers that could last long after college....."
The fir$t que$tion you should always a$k, kids, is WHO BENEFITS?
