Boston University announces its campus may not re-open until January due to COVID-19

I can’t say that I’m surprised, but I can say that I’m disappointed and concerned.

A few days ago, Boston University quietly announced that it was preparing a recovery plan to address, in part, the possibility that that public health officials deem it unsafe to open in the fall of 2020. If that happens, “then the University’s contingency plan envisions the need to consider a later in-person return, perhaps in January 2021. It also accepts the possibility that international students are likely to face unique burdens, such as travel restrictions and interruptions in the processing of visas, and it suggests that some popular master’s programs may have to be offered remotely.”

Boston University is one of the top schools in the United States and, indeed, the world. If the incredible brainpower within its walls (now most of that brainpower is working remotely) envision that the campus may not re-open this fall, then surely other colleges and universities are grappling with the same concern. The only difference is that BU, to its credit, chose to be more transparent than other institutions. Mark my words, BU will not be an outlier. But we should remember it as a leader.

What happens to the world of campus recruitment if campuses are closed. How will Fortune 1,000 companies, government agencies, and other employers of students and recent graduates reach, engage, and recruit their next class of mostly juniors for internships and seniors for entry-level jobs upon graduation? It is one thing for these organizations to say that they’ll use Zoom and other video technology, but that’s like saying they’ll just arrive on-campus and sit in a room and wait for highly qualified students to show up. That doesn’t happen without first reaching and then engaging with those students, and that means marketing your opportunities.

Pretty clearly, niche job boards like College Recruiter and virtual career fair companies are going to help with the entry level career and college hiring efforts of these organizations. We’ve always been a supplement to the on-campus efforts of these employers and, in recent years, increasingly a replacement for their on-campus recruitment efforts as a rapidly increasing minority of employers have shifted some or even all of their budget away from visiting college campuses to what some refer to as a virtual recruitment model where they leverage the power of the Internet to connect them with students and recent graduates who should be interested in the part-time, seasonal, internship, and entry-level jobs offered by these employers.

How all of this shakes out will be fascinating and the topic of our upcoming webcast, “How to recruit on-campus if campuses are closed due to COVID-19 “, scheduled for Friday, April 24th at 1pm Eastern / 10am Pacific. No registration is required as we will stream to our YouTube channel, which also means that you can watch live, delayed, or even recorded. Join us!