Walking into her first home health care visit 10 years ago, registered nurse Keli Gallagher didn’t know exactly what the next hour or  two would hold. Would her patient be doing well in his transition from hospital to home? Open to working with a stranger to move
toward better health and independence? Or struggling with his new reality?

Whatever the case, Gallagher knew that to really succeed—to ensure a patient recovering from a serious health crisis could heal and even thrive outside of a hospital setting—she’d need to provide more than medical care.

“Your first goal is to build that bond of trust,” says Gallagher, who provides services in Baltimore City and County for Bayada Home Health Care. “Then you get them to understand why you are in their home and what they can do themselves. Once you get that to happen, it’s amazing how much better people feel.”

Like many people released from the hospital to recover at home, Gallagher’s first patient was nervous. An avid baseball and football fan, the elderly man had suffered a serious exacerbation of his chronic illnesses and, though he was home, his challenges were far from over.

“He was overwhelmed and anxious about everything he had on his plate,” Gallagher recalls. After assessing him and ensuring he was safe, Gallagher got to work providing nursing care, plus a healthy dose of education and assurance. “I taught him and his wife how to manage his wounds and explained the chronic disease processes,” recalls Gallagher.

Over the next few weeks, Gallagher would return to the home regularly to provide care, assess her patient’s progress, offer encouragement, and connect the couple to community resources.

“The goal is to allow the patient to be confident and independent and then we just back off and supervise for a while,” she says.

Home health nurses like Gallagher are increasingly in demand due to an aging population, a rise in the prevalence of chronic conditions, shorter hospital stays, and a strong desire by many patients to remain in their home while they receive care. Such nurses provide essential skilled services—wound care, medication administration, post-surgical care, and disease management—and prepare patients and their families to manage their own treatment longer term.

For a patient hobbled with a fractured hip and newly home from the hospital, for example, Gallagher might visit one to three times a week for several weeks. “We go in to educate them on pain management, medications, diet, fluids, and fall prevention,” she explains. “I’m responsible for ensuring patients are safe and that they and their families are comfortable, confident, and competent in managing their care independently.”

To get the job done, Gallagher often coordinates with physical, occupational, and speech therapists, caregivers (like a spouse), and other health professionals involved in a patient’s care. She is among the roughly three percent of registered nurses who work in home health care, according to National Council of State Boards of Nursing.

Home health care is not the same as a private duty nurse, who may visit for longer blocks of time, for longer-term care, or to provide respite for family members or caregivers, with patients usually paying out of pocket. Home health nursing is often paid for by insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid for a limited period of time for patients deemed unable to leave their home for outpatient care.

“The benefit to the patient is that they get to stay in their home environment, they get one-on-one attention, a personalized plan of care, and a complete focus on them to meet their goals,” says Sarah Caro, a registered nurse and clinical assistant professor for Towson University’s Department of Nursing.

“Medicine is such a scary endeavor for so many people…I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, ‘I’ve never had a nurse who taught me this,’ or ‘I didn’t know this is available.’”

Caro, a nurse for 30 years, has worked in hospital settings as well as in home health care and hospice. “We know people do better at home. With proper support, they really can have positive outcomes.”

It’s a benefit that has ripple effects beyond the patient, with care provided in a patient’s home—whether it’s in a house, apartment, assisted living facility, or other space—freeing up inpatient resources and lessening the burden on families once a patient is discharged.

For nurses, home health care offers autonomy, flexibility, and the chance to move beyond the confines of a facility. There’s also—for patients on the path to recovery—the reward of seeing someone regain independence, says Caro.

“Often in the hospital we don’t get to see that,” she says. “We’re happy when they get to go home, but we don’t get to see that independence come back.”

Even when recovery isn’t in the cards, there is the opportunity to develop deep and lasting connections with patients and their families. Caro’s career is peppered with such connections, including a special bond with one elderly patient in failing health. She’d often linger to chat—and frequently laugh—with her after the visit.

“I would usually save her for late in the day because we sure did enjoy visiting,” Caro recalls. “We worked together so long and she sat me down one day and she said, ‘I just need to tell you—and I don’t want you to argue with me—I am ready to be comfortable.’ She felt like she had to break it to me gently that she wanted to be a hospice patient. It was really precious.” (Caro’s response: “Sweetie, we can do whatever you want.”)

Beyond the relationships there’s also the opportunity for nurses to employ a wide range of skills as they encounter varied health conditions. While some care boils down to the basics, home health nurses also may also find themselves providing the type of complex care that was once limited to inpatient settings. Thanks to increased access to telehealth, remote monitoring, and other advances, these services can now be delivered at home.

“One of the things I really like about home care nursing is it gives me the opportunity to really use all the tools in my toolbox and to continue learning as well,” says Dawn Workman, a clinical nurse manager with Johns Hopkins (JHU) Care at Home’s Personal Care division, which provides private pay services for patients seeking the care of a nurse or certified nursing assistants.

On a typical day this spring, Workman started her day with a visit to a post-partum patient, then moved on to an elderly woman who needed drain and dressing care, plus help with medications, then on to a kidney transplant patient to draw labs and collect a urine sample. The day ended with a quick check-in on a patient who had a debilitating medical condition that has required extensive surgeries.

The variety requires home health nurses to be “expert generalists,” as JHU’s Care at Home likes to think of them. “There is really nothing typical about it,” says Workman, whose 26 years in nursing have included time in emergency care and as an EMT and a medic. “It is truly ever evolving.”

At times, the work requires tackling problems with skills you might not think of as traditional nursing. Polly Easton, a Stella Maris start-of-care nurse, recalls one patient early in the pandemic who was COVID-19 positive and recovering at home.

“So here I am with a double mask, gown, and shield, sitting in someone’s bedroom to go through her medications. She brought out a rolling suitcase filled with medication, and I was like, ‘What do I even do with this?’” Easton recalls with a laugh. A little digging revealed that the patient wasn’t actually taking the medications, unbeknownst to her doctors.

“They’d see her blood pressure was high and add another prescription, and she’d collect them all but never take them because she was too overwhelmed,” says Easton, who quickly devised a solution, working with the medical team to whittle down the medication list. “This is nursing,” she says, “but it’s not really what they teach you in school.”

As rewarding as it can be, providing nursing care outside of a facility brings its own challenges, the least of which may be the logistics of handling weather and traffic when you travel to multiple homes each day. While the autonomy that comes with the job can be appealing, it also brings weighty responsibility. While home health nurses work within a care plan, with an interdisciplinary team, and with a support team a phone call away, “you really are out there by yourself,” says Caro. “It can be a little daunting,” especially for nurses just starting out in home health care.

Home health nurses may also have to push past the worries patients and their families have as they take on medical responsibilities for themselves or their loved one.

“Medicine is such a scary endeavor for so many people and that creates more fear and more resistance,” says Gallagher. Often, she finds patients are surprised by what they can accomplish. “I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, ‘I’ve never had a nurse who taught me this,’ or ‘I didn’t know this is available, I didn’t know that I could do this.’”

Another possible roadblock is the home itself. Easton has encountered patients whose homes had already been modified—with grab bars, wide doorways, even an elevator—for a parent or spouse. But often, homes are not ready to be makeshift care centers. Loose rugs, stairs, and slippery showers pose hazards for the elderly and infirmed. And then there are the pets.

“The pets are always interesting. There have been some that were small and mighty and gave me a run for my money,” says Caro, who once had a patient with a pet duck that would greet her at her car with a few not-so-friendly ankle pecks.

For Easton, the challenges of providing care in a home are also an opportunity. Walking into someone’s kitchen for example, Easton might notice their food is stored in hard-to-reach cabinets, or that their walk from the living room to the bathroom requires navigating a walker through a too-narrow path.

“I love that I can really figure out what people need that they may not be able to verbalize for themselves but that can really change their quality of life,” she says.

“The pets are interesting,” says Caro, who once had a patient with a pet duck that  would greet her at her car with a few not-so-friendly ankle pecks.

One of her easiest problems solved didn’t require any in-home modifications but instead involved removing a logistical obstacle. The elderly patient had always walked to a local pharmacy to pick up prescriptions, but after a hospitalization could no longer make the trip.

“He had been home from the hospital for three days and he didn’t have his meds yet,” she says. A quick call to switch the patient’s prescriptions to a pharmacy that delivers resolved the issue.

Of course, sometimes the problems are trickier, with medical needs that can’t be met in the home. “You come into the house and they’re like, ‘I don’t know if this looks good,’ and you’re like, ‘No, that does not look good, we’re going to call 911,’” says Easton, who developed the knowledge and skills to make such decisions over nearly 20 years of nursing.

Many home health nurses get their start in other branches of nursing, and some aren’t even aware the career path exists. For Caro, an introduction to in-home care came while she was working full-time on a telemetry unit in a small community hospital that sent nurses into the homes of congestive heart failure patients.

“Had I not had that opportunity early in my career I don’t know that I would have known how amazing home care is,” she says.

As a professor, Caro often encounters students who envision themselves tending to patients in an emergency room or an ICU after graduation. But she believes that nursing’s varied career paths are part of its appeal. “I don’t think people realize just how broad the field is and what can be done.”

The national nursing shortage has tightened the supply of all nurses—and that includes home health nurses. In response, the Home Care Association of America and the National Association for Home Care and Hospice have proposed a range of efforts, including implementing more loan forgiveness programs for nurses entering home health care, making salaries more competitive, and getting the word out so that more nurses consider home health nursing as a career option.

For Gallagher, home health nursing has been not only a viable and exciting career path, but also thoroughly rewarding. “It’s a really emotionally draining position but there are so many instances where it’s just a beautiful thing,” she says.

Often, the payoff comes as patients progress to confidently managing their own care. “I tell people all the time, the best thing is when I see them smile, when I know that they are comfortable enough and happy enough to be able to look forward to tomorrow instead of being scared,” says Gallagher, who recently had a patient burst into happy tears because she could finally leave the house on her own and take a bus to her doctor’s appointment.

Other times, the reward comes later. Gallagher will always remember her first home health patient, not just because she built trust and saw him improve enough to no longer need her care, but because a year later she got a call from his cardiologist with an update.

“He said, ‘I just saw the patient, he was in my office with his baseball cap on and he was about to go to an Orioles game,’” Gallagher recalls. “He thanked me and said, ‘You really made a difference.’”

Being an integral part of the team that helped the patient return to health and independence was its own reward, says Gallagher.

“That’s what makes us motivated to do what we do.”

[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Top Nurses package in our May 2022 issue, on newsstands now.]

After a year-long contract as an intensive care nurse at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, traveling nurse Crystal Erickson moved on to a 13-week contract at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in late summer 2021. The hospital in Wilmington, North Carolina, was experiencing a surge of patients with COVID-19 as the region was hit with the delta variant.

Erickson arrived to a team of staff nurses in the intensive care unit stretched thin from long hours and grueling work. A single nurse was responsible for up to four critically ill patients, when the typical nurse-to-patient ratio in the intensive care unit was 2:1.

“The amount of codes being called overhead was astounding. And we all knew that those patients would probably come to us, but we needed to find somewhere to put them,” Erickson wrote in a Facebook post on August 21, 2021, including a selfie with red marks on her face from wearing heavy personal protective equipment (PPE) for three, 12-hour shifts in a row. “One of the hardest things to watch is my coworkers struggling to get adequate staffing to take care of these patients.”

For hospitals in regions experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases, increasing numbers of sick patients combined with out-of-commission nurses in quarantine put a huge strain on the ability to care for patients. That’s where traveling nurses like Erickson, who can jump into action to fill a staffing need, come in.

Travel nurses work with staffing agencies to find placements at hospitals in need of extra help. Typically, placements are 13 weeks, but can be as short as eight weeks or renewed by the hospital as needed for up to one year. In addition to helping nurses find placements, staffing agencies typically provide stipends for housing, meals, and mileage, and help nurses get any needed licensure, labs, or certifications required for the position. In addition to already existing nationwide nursing shortages, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the demand for travel nurses. But the concept of travel nursing has been around for decades.

Some of the best-known nurses in history traveled to areas where there was an urgent need to provide care. During the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale—the founder of modern nursing—led a group of 38 women from London to Istanbul to treat injured soldiers at the request of the British war secretary. And American Red Cross founder Clara Barton brought aid to soldiers on the frontlines of Civil War battlefields from Harpers Ferry to Charleston. But the modern history of travel nursing began in New Orleans in 1978, when hospitals contracted short-term help to address the additional need during Mardi Gras.

“This idea of moving nurses from one area to another area to provide a service where there’s an increased demand is not something novel,” says Rodnita K. Davis, PhD, assistant professor and director of entry-level nursing programs at Notre Dame of Maryland University (NDMU). “Most countries go through cyclical shortages as a result of an increased demand and then rising nursing shortages.”

In the more recent past, however, Davis explains that the COVID-19 pandemic has “exponentially increased the demands on the health care system, in turn increasing the demand for nurses.”

“THIS IDEA OF MOVING NURSES FROM ONE AREA TO ANOTHER AREA TO PROVIDE A SERVICE WHERE THERE’S AN INCREASED DEMAND IS NOT SOMETHING NOVEL . . .”

In September 2021, when much of the U.S. was experiencing the peak of the delta variant, Aya Healthcare, the largest travel health care staffing agency in North America, reported 47,694 travel nurse job openings—an all-time high since the start of the pandemic, and more than six times the job volume for the same period in 2019. Compounding the usual cyclical shortages, such as attrition from an aging workforce, Davis points to mental and physical burnout from more than two years of nursing during the pandemic as factors in the critical need for additional staff. To put it plainly, a lot of nurses are quitting their jobs.

“The consequences of the pandemic are causing an increase in the number of staff nurses who are leaving the bedside,” she acknowledges. “All of those factors come into play as we see this surge in the need for travel nurses.”

Prior to the pandemic, most of Erickson’s assignments were for the typical 13-week contract—about the same amount of time many hospitals take to train new nurses. “By the time it was finished they would have staff available to start full-time in the role,” Erickson recalls. But at the height of the pandemic, for regions seeing an uptick in cases and hospitalizations, it was “crisis mode.”

“You really have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable when you’re starting a new job all the time,” says Erickson, who is originally from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “It can be overwhelming at times, but I have never had an assignment where I haven’t felt welcomed,” she adds, noting that traveling nurses on crisis contracts can work four to six 12-hour shifts per week on a short-term basis with only a day or two of training. They also bring home two to three times more than a staff nurse’s salary, making the profession appealing to nurses looking to increase their pay while seeing more of the country and gaining professional experience.

Before the pandemic, travel nurses made roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per week. The rate has jumped to $3,000 to $5,000 per week in areas with critical needs. The median hourly wage for registered nurses in Maryland was $38 in 2020, or about $1,368 per week, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But along with the higher pay scale comes the expectation that travel nurses have the experience to hit the ground running, NDMU’s Davis explains.

“You really have to be confident, and an advanced practitioner, to be able to take those travel assignments, because they don’t typically come with an extended orientation,” she says. “It may be an hour or four-hour or, if you’re lucky, maybe even an eight-hour orientation. But then you are expected to fully function in that role with minimal support.”

While working alongside a temp nurse making double or triple your own salary could cause tension, Erickson says she hasn’t ever had issues with her co-workers. “They might ask how much I make, and I’ve been open with them,” Erickson says. “Honestly, they are short staffed, so they are more welcoming of the help because it takes some of the load o of them.”

With four years’ experience as a medical-surgical nurse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and then three years as an intensive care nurse in Kansas City, Missouri, Erickson transitioned to travel nursing in 2019.

“I was turning 30 at the time and I thought, if I don’t do it now, I never will,” Erickson recalls. Since then, she has worked in Missouri, Florida, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina. A er completing her contract in Wilmington, Erickson returned to Maryland in November 2021 on a contract, working in the University of Maryland Medical Center’s surgical ICU.

Like staff nurses, the vast majority—78 percent—of travel nurses are women, with an average age of 44. Many travel with a pet or family members, while others opt for local contracts that allow them to more easily spend time with family during their days off.

While the biggest U.S. travel staffing agencies like Aya Healthcare place nurses only within the U.S., agencies like Worldwide Travel Staffing specialize in placing nurses in roles outside the U.S., or nurses can find work through staffing agencies based in the host country. Travel nurses from abroad with advanced degrees may work in the U.S. with the H-1B visa, which allows employers to petition for a temporary worker in a specialty occupation.

“I wanted more financial freedom,” says Erickson, who made more than double her compensation as a staff nurse after signing with Aya Healthcare. “But more than the money, it was the experiences I would gain—getting to travel to new locations and get paid to do it. I could explore the food, the sightseeing, the people.”

Seeing new places, gaining more experience, and making more money are some of the key “push-pull” factors that influence nurses to make the move from a staff position to traveling, according to Davis at NDMU.

“Push factors are those things that are kind of pushing the individual out of their current place of employment, whether it’s low pay, increased workloads, or if they feel like it’s an unsafe work environment, maybe because of staffing ratios, and things of that nature,” Davis explains.

As for the “pull” factors, “It becomes this conversation around equity and fairness,” Davis says. “For some people, the pull factor is, ‘Well, if I am going to do the same work, why not get the increased compensation?’”

In addition to the leap in pay, the other advantages of being a travel nurse include increased flexibility, with the option to take time o in between contracts, and the opportunity to live in different parts of the country—Davis says her former colleagues have taken jobs in Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Additionally, travel nurses can gain experience in different hospital settings.

But for many, the pandemic was the catalyst to transition into travel nursing not just for better pay, but for the opportunity to bring their skills where there is greatest need.

“Nurses have been able to go into those places that are experiencing extreme needs and give up themselves, their time, their resources, their knowledge, to support those healthcare systems,” Davis says. For many nurses, that kind of instinct toward service is simply part of their calling. “I’ve definitely seen an uptick in that and know colleagues who have responded to the call amid this pandemic,” Davis says.

Hospitals are struggling to pay elevated fees to compensate for nursing shortages, but in many cases, they have no choice. LifeBridge Health, which operates five hospitals and affiliated care centers in the Greater Baltimore region, has been hit by the nursing shortage like most health care groups across the country.

“COVID has made [the shortage] even worse; a lot of nurses have left bedside nursing to do other things that do not have direct patient contact,” explains Leslie Simmons, LifeBridge Health’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. “Some nurses retired early, part of that was fear and the length of the pandemic. It was exhausting.”

Travel nurses play an important role in augmenting the staffing matrix, Simmons says. Generally, she says, LifeBridge Health brings in nurses for eight-to-12-week assignments when staff members are out for maternity leave or summer vacations, or during peak flu season.

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, LifeBridge Health employed about 200 travel nurses across the system. But paying for them became a challenge when hourly rates the hospital pays staffing agencies for critical care nurses jumped from $100 to $225 per hour.

“It was a challenge because agencies were paying skyrocketing prices, and despite what we were doing to retain staff, we couldn’t keep up,” Simmons says, noting that LifeBridge Health is projected to spend $58 million on travel nurses across all facilities for fiscal year 2022, which ends in June, compared to just $13 million in the 2020 fiscal year. “It’s a 445 percent increase from two years ago. We just can’t sustain that.”

Simmons, who comes from a family of nurses and whose daughter was considering a travel job, doesn’t blame the nurses for wanting to make more money. “We are grateful we had travel nurses to help us through it,” she says. “It was difficult to pay their rates, but I don’t know that we could have done it without them.”

But travel nurses aren’t a sustainable long-term solution for staff shortages. In fact, several groups led by the American Hospital Association and including 200 bipartisan members of Congress, have demanded an investigation by the White House into the pricing practices of the staffing agencies that place travel nurses around the country. They note rapidly inflating prices with 40 percent pro t margins and the consolidation of staffing agencies by private equity firms since 2021.

To retain and grow its own workforce, LifeBridge Health spent $14.5 million in salary increases and $26 million in sign-on and retention bonuses. “[But] it’s not enough,” Simmons says. “The agencies would hire our staff members and pay o their retention bonuses.”

For a long-term solution to the shortages, LifeBridge Health has recruited more than 100 foreign-educated nurses, with many starting this spring at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore. Recruiting physicians, nurses, and other allied health care professionals from abroad has happened for more than 70 years and is one piece of addressing the current nursing shortage, according to the American Association of International Healthcare Recruitment.

“We think it’s a more sustainable way to bring more nurses into the state,” Simmons says. They also are focusing on training recent nurse graduates with residency programs and making sure staff salaries stay competitive. Veteran nurse and Baltimore native Bryan Liquido made the move to travel nursing in February to help support his extended family financially after they suffered unexpected losses due to COVID-19.

“I LIKE FEELING UNEASY. IF I DON’T FEEL LIKE I’M LEARNING SOMETHING, IT’S TIME TO MOVE ON. I’M USED TO BEING ADAPTABLE AND THIS IS JUST ANOTHER TEST OF THAT.”

Liquido, whose extensive résumé includes seven years on the lifeline critical care transport team with the Johns Hopkins Hospital—two of which were as a flight nurse for the STAT MedEvac helicopter—has the personality and skillset to excel in the unknown, constantly changing environment of travel nursing.

“I’m an adrenaline junky,” he says. “I like feeling uneasy. If I don’t feel like I’m learning something, it’s time to move on. I’m used to being adaptable and this is just another test of that.”

During the pandemic, Liquido often worked 50-plus hours per week at his staff position, often beside travel nurses. “There was a noticeable change,” he says of the long-term fatigue after a year of the pandemic. “In the beginning it was enraging for the staff that someone was making double, triple—at the height of it, quadruple—what you made as a staff nurse,” he says.

But over time, he says, a general “desensitization” resulted in a reluctant acceptance among staff nurses. “Now, most people are like, ‘this is the way it is,’ and I don’t see that animosity anymore if the traveler is good, and most of my experiences with travelers as a staff nurse is that they’ve all been super competent.”

And he says has no regrets about making the transition to travel nurse with the Aya Healthcare agency. He’s now working his first assignment at York Hospital’s open heart intensive care unit. “Now I can just do my three shifts, deliver quality care, then be able to still have something left in the tank to take back to my family,” says the father of two.

“Everybody has their own reasons for travel,” says Liquido. “For me it’s not purely about money. That’s a plus, but it’s about family and having that better work-life balance.”

he phrase “the new normal” has been thrown around since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and as America struggles to define—and design—what that is exactly, colleges are paving the way for what it might look like.

After the chaos and uncertainty of 2020, colleges and universities throughout the Baltimore region began to find their groove as they moved into the 2021-2022 school year. Coronavirus safety committees had been erected, new mandates put in place, safety protocols implemented—everything from vaccine requirements to temperature checks to quarantine procedures and wastewater testing that can pinpoint a COVID infection before anyone is symptomatic.

By some counts, colleges may very well be the safest places to live and work.

“Just following simple rules of wearing face masks and social distancing, using wastewater management and testing when we need to, we have, in many ways, been able to return to normal life,” says Goucher College President Kent Devereaux. “Full athletics, student clubs, dining in the dining hall, use of the library—everything that you’d normally have, we’ve been able to return to.”

Despite the challenges and anxieties faced by students, staff, and faculty alike, some unexpected silver linings have emerged.

“It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

The widespread adoption of technology across college campuses has proven to provide more flexibility, efficiency, and innovation—and even accessibility, in some cases. Counseling sessions, for example, began to be conducted remotely during the pandemic and many students found that they preferred it to in-person sessions. Students who cannot, for whatever reason, make it to an in-person class can now study from anywhere.

Challenging times, combined with advances in technology and the general acceptance of it, have also brought more cooperation and collaboration among schools. It’s becoming more common, for example, for schools that offer complementary programs to partner with one another to offer students an educational pathway to continue studies in their chosen areas. That may mean a discounted tuition rate, a transfer of class credits, or an internship through a partner school.

Maybe most importantly though, schools, at their best, foster an environment where students are supported, expand who they are, and connect with like-minded people. At a time when gathering together is not always safe, being in a community has become even more precious, and students have found new ways to connect.

OCA Mocha, a coffeehouse in Arbutus founded by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) students, is one example of how effective a gathering place can be at a time when people are craving human connection. What started as a class assignment—to design a community center of some sort—has become a gathering place not just for UMBC students and alumni, but the Arbutus community at large.

“We’ve heard a lot of stories from people who are extremely grateful to have this space,” says Michael Berardi, UMBC class of 2019 and co-founder and general manager of OCA Mocha, which stands for Opportunities for Community Alliances. The coffee shop includes a stage, a community room, and an art gallery, employs UMBC students and alumni, and provides internship opportunities for current UMBC students.

“We have local groups and organizations that meet regularly in our community space and are grateful to not have to meet in someone’s living room or church basement,” says Berardi. “We see a lot of connections being made. It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

We checked in with colleges and universities throughout the region to find out what’s new and what campus life and classes look like, two years into the pandemic.

COPPIN STATE UNIVERSITY
A historically Black institution founded in 1900, Coppin State University is situated in the heart of Baltimore City in the Mondawmin neighborhood. Part of the University System of Maryland in Baltimore, the school offers 32 undergraduate and 11 graduate degrees, along with nine certificate programs and one doctorate degree. It’s been rated No. 4 Best HBCU in the Nation (College Consensus), the Top 5 Best Value Online Program (Online School Center), and No. 17 Best Value in the Nation (College Consensus).

In the summer of 2021, CSU announced its Student Debt Relief Initiative, which clears roughly $1 million in student balances and provided a $1,200 credit to every student enrolled in the fall 2021 semester. CSU also created the Freddie Gray Student Success Scholarship, which is available to graduates of Carver Vocational-Technical High School, where Gray was a student.

Coppin also takes esports (competitive video gaming) seriously. In the fall of 2021, Coppin became the first HBCU to open a building on campus exclusively devoted to esports. The Premier Esports Lab opened in September with a guest appearance from Grammy-nominated artist Cordae.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,383 undergraduates, 341 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $6,809 in-state, $13,334 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 40%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Business, Biology, Education, and Criminal Justice, Rehabilitation Counseling

DICKINSON COLLEGE
Founded in 1783, Dickinson College is a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with a suburban campus that spans 144 acres. The school offers 41 undergraduate degrees within 17 fields of study.

It’s been rated as one of the best schools in the country for its sustainability efforts, which include an 80-acre, USDA-certified organic farm. Princeton Review rated it No. 2 in the Top 50 Green Colleges, and it was rated No. 2 in Overall Top Performers among baccalaureate institutions in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s “Sustainable Campus Index” in 2019 and 2020.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,345
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $58,708
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 52%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: International Business, Economics, Political Science & Government, International Relations & National Security, General Psychology

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE
Gettysburg College, a private, liberal arts school, sits on 225 acres adjacent to the historical Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. Many of the buildings on campus are historically significant, so it’s no wonder that it draws students interested in studying history.

The school offers 65 academic programs, more than 120 campus clubs and organizations, and 800 events on campus each year, plus more than 100 study-abroad opportunities open to students.

Its Majestic Theater serves as a venue for the greater Gettysburg community, hosting national acts as well as performances by the school’s Sunderman Conservatory of Music students.

It’s ranked No. 12 for “students who study the most” by the Princeton Review, which also ranked Gettysburg College’s dining hall No. 9 in the country for best campus food.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,600
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $59,960
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 56%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Political Science, Economics, Health Sciences, Organization and Management Studies, History, Psychology

GOUCHER COLLEGE
A private, liberal arts college in Towson, Goucher College prides itself on its close-knit community.

Goucher was extremely proactive when it came to COVID-19 precautions, being the first in the state to implement wastewater testing, which is able to isolate COVID infections by dorm.

Also of note: The college recently opened two new residence halls as part of the school’s First-Year Village. One hundred percent of Goucher students study abroad, and the school is committed to sustainability.

Most recently, Goucher has begun exciting partnerships with other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, Loyola University, and more to come, to provide a pathway for students to continue their education beyond Goucher. For instance, their 4+1 MBA Program allows students to earn an advanced business degree through Loyola via a “Fast Track” admission process, and at a 15% discount on tuition.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,100
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $48,000
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 79%
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Psychology, International Relations, Economics, Political Science, Business Administration

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Johns Hopkins University (JHU) offers nine academic divisions and hundreds of courses of study, with campuses spread throughout Baltimore, including the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory in Mount Vernon. Its main Homewood campus is located on North Charles Street.

The prestigious, world-renowned university has a strong reputation for its public health and medical studies and has been compared to Ivy League schools.

One of its points of pride is its financial aid program, which covers 100% of calculated need for every admitted student, without loans. This means JHU works with families to calculate what they can afford to contribute toward the total cost of attendance—including meals, books, travel, and other expenses—and JHU covers the rest with grants that don’t need to be repaid.

This school year, JHU added two new minors: Latin American Studies and Writing Seminars.

It also announced new efforts this year to move toward a broader, more flexible undergraduate educational experience that will include a required first-year seminar and the streamlining of major requirements to allow for greater intellectual exploration.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,333 undergraduates, 22,559 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 6:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $56,313 for Peabody Institute, $58,720 for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 9%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Economics, Public Health Studies, International Studies

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
This private, Jesuit institution offers undergraduate and graduate programs on a beautiful urban campus in northern Baltimore City. Education at Loyola is based in the Jesuit tradition of scholarship cura personalis, or care for the whole person. Loyola is known for its academic rigor while helping students lead purposeful lives. Seventy percent of students study abroad. It currently ranks fourth in best universities in the North region according to U.S. News & World Report.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,787 undergraduates, 1,353 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $53,430
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 80%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Journalism, Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, English Language and Literature, Engineering and Education.

McDANIEL COLLEGE
McDaniel College sits in a bucolic setting near Westminster in Carroll County. The private, four-year liberal arts college offers more than 70 undergraduate programs of study and more than 20 graduate programs. McDaniel’s most recent addition to its curriculum is a National Security Fellows Program that provides students with knowledge, skills, and experience in national security as well as the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intrastate political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.

Also new this year, McDaniel appointed an inaugural associate provost for equity and belonging who provides vision and leadership to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and works in collaboration with the provost to co-lead the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion administrative committee, and guides the Bias Education Response Support Team.

The school also launched a new STEM Center to serve as a physical hub to support students studying the sciences. It hosts workshops and other events while also supplying online and hybrid support.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,757 undergraduates, 1,324 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $46,336
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Kinesiology, Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Political Science, International Studies

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The largest of Maryland’s HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Morgan is a public institution founded in 1867. It is situated in northeast Baltimore. As a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution, Morgan provides instruction to a multiethnic, multiracial, multinational student body and offers more than 140 academic programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, Morgan fulfills its mission to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment through intense community level study and pioneering solutions.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,270 undergraduates, 1,364 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $8,008 for in-state and $18,480 for out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 73%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Civil Engineering, Communications Engineering, Business Administration and Management, Social Work, Biology/Biological Sciences, Architecture, Finance, Psychology, Sociology

NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY
A private, Catholic liberal arts university in northern Baltimore, Notre Dame of Maryland University offers programs from undergraduate through PhD, as well as Maryland’s only women’s college. It recently launched the first master’s of art degree in Art Therapy program in the state.
The beautiful, wooded campus is just steps from the bustling downtown Baltimore culture. With values rooted in Catholicism, the school focuses on service to others and social responsibility.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 783
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $39,675
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 88%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Education, Biology, Art Therapy, Pharmacy

TOWSON UNIVERSITY
One of the largest public universities in the state, Towson University offers more than 60 undergraduate majors and continues to draw students from other states, though it remains part of the University System of Maryland.

Its campus continues to expand, with a huge new dining hall, a 23,000-foot recreation and fitness facility with an indoor swimming pool, and its 5,200-seat arena for sporting events and concerts. In 2021, it opened its new Science Complex, the largest academic building on campus at 320,000 square feet.

In September, Towson opened its StarTUp at the Armory, a space for startups and new businesses to engage with the broader community and larger businesses. It serves as a home to Towson’s entrepreneurship programs, as well as student competitions and events.

While Towson remains the largest supplier of medical professionals and educators in the state, the university has also built a strong reputation for its College of Fine Arts and Communication, as well as its Asian Arts & Culture Center, both of which bring students into the wider community and the Baltimore community to Towson for enriching performing arts, music, and visual art programs.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 17,907 undergraduates, 2,949 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 16:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $7,100 in-state, $22,152 out-of-state
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Education, Nursing, Exercise Science, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
University of Maryland, Baltimore is Maryland’s only public health, law, and human services university. Located in downtown Baltimore, it offers 86 degree and certificate programs through its six nationally ranked professional schools—dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work—and an interdisciplinary graduate school.

The school’s 14-acre BioPark is Baltimore’s biggest biotechnology cluster, employing 1,000 people, and remains on the cutting edge of new drugs, treatments, and medical devices.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 7,244
• ANNUAL TUITION: Varies by school
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Social Work

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY
University of Maryland, Baltimore County educates a campus of more than 10,000 students in programs spanning the arts, engineering, information technology, humanities, sciences, preprofessional studies, and social sciences. Located on the edge of Baltimore County, it allows easy access into the city and all the conveniences of suburban life and housing. It also offers plenty of opportunities for study abroad.

In the fall of 2021, UMBC opened the Center for Well-Being, a new two-story complex that houses Retriever Integrated Health, Student Conduct and Community Standards, and i3b’s Gathering Space for Spiritual Well-Being. UMBC’s already significant NASA partnerships have continued to grow. In October, NASA announced a major award of $72 million over three years for the new Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II center. UMBC is leading the national consortium and will receive over $38 million. The GESTAR II consortium will support over 120 researchers, creating extensive opportunities for breakthroughs in Earth and atmospheric science research, and providing major opportunities for students to conduct research and be mentored by NASA scientists and engineers.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 13,638
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 17:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $12,280 in-state, $28,470 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts

Cited tuition costs exclude room and board and books.