{"doi":"10.1101/2021.10.07.21264419","title":"Higher education responses to COVID-19 in the United States: Evidence for the impacts of university policy","abstract":"Abstract With a dataset of testing and case counts from over 1,400 institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the United States, we analyze the number of infections and deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in the counties surrounding these IHEs during the Fall 2020 semester (August to December, 2020). We used a matching procedure designed to create groups of counties that are aligned along age, race, income, population, and urban/rural categories—socio-demographic variables that have been shown to be correlated with COVID-19 outcomes. We find that counties with IHEs that remained primarily online experienced fewer cases and deaths during the Fall 2020 semester; whereas before and after the semester, these two groups had almost identical COVID-19 incidence. Additionally, we see fewer deaths in counties with IHEs that reported conducting any on-campus testing compared to those that reported none. We complement the statistical analysis with a case study of IHEs in Massachusetts—a rich data state in our dataset—which further highlights the importance of IHE-affiliated testing for the broader community. The results in this work suggest that campus testing can itself be thought of as a mitigation policy and that allocating additional resources to IHEs to support efforts to regularly test students and staff would be beneficial to mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in the general population.","journal":"medRxiv","year":2021,"id":219430,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.5614,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":570854,"name":"Nicholas Generous","orcid":"0000-0003-2238-428X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":107959,"name":"Matteo Chinazzi","orcid":"0000-0002-5955-1929","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":818024,"name":"Zarana Bhadricha","orcid":"0000-0003-1424-2409","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":818678,"name":"Rishab Gunashekar","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":818025,"name":"Preeti Kori","orcid":"0000-0002-7601-9221","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":818026,"name":"Bodian Li","orcid":"0000-0003-0747-7998","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":818027,"name":"Stefan McCabe","orcid":"0000-0002-7180-145X","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":818028,"name":"Jon Green","orcid":"0000-0002-6542-6745","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":622928,"name":"David Lazer","orcid":"0000-0002-7991-9110","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":818029,"name":"Christopher R. Marsicano","orcid":"0000-0001-5855-2949","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":235271,"name":"Samuel V. Scarpino","orcid":"0000-0001-5716-2770","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":44593,"name":"Alessandro Vespignani","orcid":"0000-0003-3419-4205","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":555549,"name":"Brennan Klein","orcid":"0000-0001-8326-5044","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":52,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:53:38.409982Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}