My daughter is a 3rd year at university and her school seems to be trying hard to make “distance-learning” work. Particularly as you get deep into a major, everyone is learning that group interaction, specialization, hands-on training, etc… is very difficult to transfer on-line. Internships have stopped. Meetings with industry professionals have stopped. From what I would guess, I would say class work has been cut down 20-30% to allow for the on-line format (fewer projects, reduced office-hours with teacher, etc..) It works OK for now, because she already knows the professors, knows her classmates, class style and culture were in place since January, and they had formed into work and study groups before Coronavirus hit.
NONE of that would exist for an incoming freshman. As you point out, literally everything is new, and it would be extremely difficult to make the jump in expectations, work-needed and competition from others with a pure “on-line” format. Beyond that, they would lose the life-long, memory forming events of making new friends, going to the first homecoming game, etc….
OTOH, he had a wicked sense of humor that would never be employed with a virtual classroom. I was targeted on several occasions, as I was his only student (of 80) that was in ROTC. It was never personal, it was more poking fun at the waste found in government and the military. He had personal experience, having served in the Navy during WWII.
There was one episode that I dust off when asked "what was the experience like at Gonzaga?" During March Madness, I'm asked that when I'm at a sports bar by those that attended huge Power Conference schools. The usual response to my old, dusted off stories is "damn, my college experience was nothing like that."
A few of my buddies were ticked off at me, so they prepared a fake drop slip for all 3 of my accounting classes. They got the professor to give it to me after the first hour of our 3 hour long CPA review class. I took a look at it, and put it aside for after class.
It must have been torture for my friends, trying to stifle their laughter for two hours. Finally, the secret was out at the end of class...I thought it was great that the professor played along with it.
That drop slip remains in one of my photo albums from college.
Never would've happened in today's online world.
Sorry to digress, but here's one of my finest moments, academically. I knew I had aced the fall semester final exam in cost accounting. When we compared notes, I was the outlier with my answers. I wasn't the greatest of students, so my answers were met with skepticism.
When we returned for the spring semester, we were in the GU bookstore, when our professor entered. When he saw me, he walked up to me and said, "NHN, I want to shake your hand, I'm proud of you!" To say that jaws were dropping was an understatement.
I scored something like a 141/150 on the test. To put his scoring in perspective, he'd give a B+ for 90/150.