Ninety-eight percent of Lehman College classes will be fully online

Even though Lehman College is getting ready to welcome its 15,000 students to the start of the fall semester next week, the Bronx campus is expected to remain mostly empty.

College President Daniel Lemons says, "There will be really at any given time of the day on campus, 20, 30, 40, 50 students -- very small numbers of students."

He says Lehman led the CUNY system in online instruction before the pandemic, which helped faculty plan for how to teach during it.

Of the more than 3,000 courses being offered at the college this fall, 98% of them will be fully online.

About 30 classes are expected to meet in-person and on campus. However, they will not meet consistently since they'll be using a hybrid learning model.

Health screenings, mandatory masks, staggered schedules and social distancing will apply to those in-person activities.

Researchers pursuing PhDs in biology, chemistry and anthropology have been following these regulations since Phase 2 allowed them to return to their hands-on work in July.

The rest of the science programs, like most other departments, will be remote.

More than 1,000 laptops were sent to students to keep them connected while off-campus.