UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said Thursday that the school might stick with online courses for the fall quarter due to the coronavirus, but that he doesn’t see it becoming a permanent arrangement.

He said the University of California system is considering the option for its undergraduate campuses and that UC executives will make the final decision.

“I think (staying with online) is completely within the realm of possibility,” said Khosla, whose school has nearly 39,000 students.

“We have not made a decision about the fall quarter yet. We are looking at multiple models and have activated a continuity of education task force, a continuity of research task force and are also working with public health experts to help inform such a decision in concert with the UC system.”


The California State University system is weighing the same option for its schools, including its campuses in San Diego and San Marcos. Those two schools collectively serve nearly 50,000 students.

It’s also possible that San Diego County’s two other major four-year schools — the University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University — might stay with online instruction through the end of the year. Neither school has publicly committed to bringing students back to campus in the fall.

Those two universities collectively serve roughly 12,000 students.

“I think this (pandemic) is such a big shock, people are accepting of (temporary measures) and they are managing their lives in the context of the constraints on what they can do,” Khosla said in an interview . “But I don’t think that anybody is thinking that this is going to be a way of life going out.”


Keeping classes online could produce culture shock for colleges and students, especially freshmen.

“The memories I made during my fall freshman quarter largely shaped the future of my time here,” said Daisy Scott, a senior who serves as editor of The Guardian, a campus newspaper. “I met a good majority of my friends during that quarter, and that’s when I got involved with student organizations.

“I think that it is important to pay attention to the pandemic and to follow health and safety precautions. But I feel sad for incoming freshmen.”

Schools such as UCSD, SDSU and USD encourage freshmen to arrive on campus well before the fall semester starts to help them adjust to college life. It is one of the reasons that UCSD is greatly expanding on-campus housing. The university is building dorms that could accommodate 2,000 students, starting this fall.


The county’s five major universities were forced to quickly move nearly 20,000 students out of dorms in March to reduce the chances that people would be infected with the novel coronavirus.

The pandemic has cost local schools tens of millions of dollars, and it might cost them students. SDSU says in an online document that the university could experience an enrollment drop this fall. That’s also a possibility at UCSD, where enrollment has increased by 11,716 since fall 2007.