Analysis of COVID-19 Mitigation Measures on a Small Liberal Arts College Network

Abstract

Small, liberal arts colleges are known to have close campus communities with strong relationships between professors and students. In this paper we consider the person-to-group and related person-to-person network at one of these institutions using student and faculty data from Fall 2019 courses, athletics, ensembles, housing, and student organizations. This data is used as a baseline to model the Fall 2020 semester with the college’s COVID-19 mitigation strategies: cancel or virtualize some groups, split the semester into two independent sessions, and separate larger courses into hybrid meetings. Network analysis shows that students and faculty had at most 4 degrees of separation in Fall 2019, student organizations can have a large impact on campus connectedness, all semester modifications implemented in Fall 2020 can reduce connectedness, and the largest reduction was seen by splitting the semester into two sessions.