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

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.