Walking in the University of Memphis: Which College Campuses Opened in Fall 2020?

In Fall 2020, some colleges opened their campuses to students, while others transitioned largely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nick Huntington-Klein (Seattle University) used location data to build a sensitive measure of exactly how open each college was based on year-on-year foot traffic changes, picking up variation in shutdown-policy design and implementation that could not be captured by announcements about reopening plans. This involves a procedure for how to link thousands of POIs to specific colleges. Then, he evaluated which college attributes, such as online education preparedness, dependence on dorm life, and political environment predicted the choice of how much to reopen.