Stanford to invite juniors and seniors to campus for spring quarter

After carefully evaluating the COVID-19 situation, Stanford will offer juniors and seniors the opportunity to return to campus for the spring quarter, with systems and safeguards in place to protect our community’s health. Read the full announcement here.

More than 6,600 students currently live on campus, including approximately 5,100 graduate students and 1,500 undergraduates, who were approved to live on campus due to special circumstances. As of now, 1,300 juniors and seniors have applied for campus housing in the spring quarter. All returning undergraduates in campus housing will have private sleeping spaces.

Three criteria influenced the decision:

• Modeling by the Stanford School of Medicine experts suggests that the trajectory of COVID-19 this spring is likely to be manageable.
• Testing and response protocols, refined during winter quarter, proved highly effective in limiting community spread.
• While many restrictions will remain in place, Stanford has greater hope of offering a meaningful on-campus experience in the spring.

Most undergraduate instruction will continue to be remote, regardless of whether students choose to live on-campus for the quarter or elsewhere. Juniors and seniors who choose not to come to campus will still have access to their Stanford education through virtual coursework.

Students on campus will continue to have mandatory twice-weekly COVID-19 testing, through the university, along with two-test arrival testing for newly arriving undergraduates. COVID-19 testing protocols implemented during the winter were effective in identifying and quickly isolating COVID-positive cases as students arrived on campus at the beginning of the quarter. Stanford saw almost no community spread throughout the winter quarter due to our robust contract tracing and quarantine systems for close contacts of infected individuals.