They spent months training professors, streamlining communications with students, and fostering a sense of community online. The problem? These colleges are in the minority.

While many instructors—regardless of their institutions’ stated plans—scrambled to learn how to become better online teachers, colleges that decided in May or June to teach the fall online have been better positioned to help them make such improvements. Instead of spending their summers planning to teach hybrid courses in socially distant classrooms, professors have been able to focus their attention on how to design a fully online course.

As colleges bring students back to campuses for the fall semester, questions are increasingly being raised about what it would take to send them home or revert to online instruction in the event of an outbreak of COVID-19.

Some colleges are publishing "triggers" that will lead them to consider closing; others refuse to boil decision making down to a few numbers.