Despite surge in COVID cases, 83% US universities plan to hold physical, offline classes

Earlier this month, International students in the USA found themselves in a fix when the Trump administration issued a new policy. With the onset of the pandemic, these students who hold F1 and M1 visas would have had to leave the country or transfer to another school if their school's fall semester was held completely online. The US government, however, rescinded the policy on July 14, much to the relief of the students.

However, data collected by returntocampus.info suggests that most of the US universities are planning to hold in-person lectures in the next semester. While a whopping 57.9 per cent of the educational institutions plan to hold in-person lectures, 25.6 per cent of them have proposed a hybrid model, which will include both online and offline lectures. This includes the prestigious Dartmouth College too. This means that the older policy wouldn't have affected a lot of international students.

According to the data that is based on official announcements from 1,137 universities, only 8.5 per cent of the universities are planning to hold their classes completely online. This list of 97 colleges includes Princeton University too. 19 colleges are waiting to make a decision on what model works the best.

COVID cases in the US are seeing a surge and the country has the maximum number of cases in the world. With a hike of more than 70,000 new cases, 3.53 million people in the country tested positive for COVID. More than 138,000 people have succumbed to the virus.