Updated 5/3/20, 3:00 pm: “Daniela Dayan” and all other mentions to “Dayen”

For high school seniors, the deadline to commit to a college is May 1. However, the coronavirus pandemic has interrupted the process for many SCHS seniors.

Senior Daniela Dayen was planning to tour colleges over spring break, but instead had to learn information digitally because of the coronavirus.

“Throughout the month of April, I was looking forward to actually going on college tours,” Dayen said. “Instead, because of the coronavirus…I had to do all the virtual tours and try to get in contact with the students of the school to talk to, which is really not the same experience.”

Similar to Dayen, senior Brandon McClelland believes the coronavirus has impacted his decision because he could not visit colleges. Though he appreciates colleges offering support like virtual tours and Q&As, he believes they should have better outreach.

“I think a lot of the resources needed to make a decision are already online, but colleges should do a better job of publicizing them and making sure students have access to them,” McClelland said.

Other students are concerned about how the coronavirus will affect college starting in the fall. Senior Andrew Gray has committed to University of Arizona, but does not believe attending is worth the cost if he cannot be on campus.

“If University of Arizona goes to online classes, I’m going to defer a year and attend community college for a bit to save money,” Gray said.

With many changes in a short amount of time, some students believe colleges should delay the decision deadline.

“It might give students more time to really think about their options because everything is changing because of the coronavirus,” Dayen said.

McClelland, on the other hand, believes that delaying decision dates may be impractical.

“It’s something that colleges should consider, but I don’t really think that they have much room to push it back because they still need to do waitlist admissions throughout May, and I think that it would be detrimental to those students if they had to wait even longer to find out where they are going to go,” McClelland said.

Either way, many seniors agree the coronavirus is causing numerous changes for the college-bound.

“It’s awful that the start of college is currently jeopardized because that’s the only thing we really have to look forward to,” Dayen said. “If fall quarter starts online, it will be really upsetting, and we will be losing even more experiences.”