By: Michael Mandarino, Follow South Jersey Managing Editor
DEPTFORD TOWNSHIP & VINELAND, N.J. — Rowan College of South Jersey’s Gloucester and Cumberland County campuses will return to in-person learning for the start of the fall 2021 semester, which is scheduled to begin on September 1 at the Gloucester campus.
Students will be given a choice of four learning methods for the fall semester: on-campus, hybrid, live online, and traditional online. RCSJ will give its students the flexibility to choose which learning method they’re most comfortable with as optimism grows regarding the COVID-19 vaccine in the United States.
“As the cold days of winter come to an end and spring approaches, the anticipation of warm weather and vaccinations offers us hope for brighter days ahead,” RCSJ President Frederick Keating said in a press release. “I am excited at the prospect of bringing students back on campus this fall. Looking to the future with expectation and optimism provides us all with a much-needed boost, particularly as we look to return to normal, daily life.”
Rowan College of South Jersey is the first university in the state to announce a planned return to in-person classes next fall. A handful of larger universities throughout the country, including Clemson, Arizona State, Tennessee, Penn State, Auburn, and Iowa, have all announced plans to return to in-person classes in the fall.
RCSJ’s summer courses will be delivered in the live and traditional online formats, partially due to the fact that the college’s Gloucester campus is currently being used as a COVID-19 vaccine hub. RCSJ-Gloucester is serving as one of six mega sites scattered across New Jersey as part of its effort to vaccinate 70% of its adult population, or approximately 4.7 million people, by the beginning of summer.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said that the United States will have enough supply to vaccinate every American adult by the end of May thanks to a new partnership between Merck and Johnson & Johnson. The two corporate rivals will work together in production of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine model, which received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration over the weekend.
New Jersey has now put at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose in more than two million arms since its rollout began in December. RCSJ-Gloucester’s mega site has accounted for more than 100,000 of those vaccinations since it opened in January.
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