After a tough fall semester battling the varied ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic, many university officials are preparing to do something a lot of experts considered unthinkable a few months ago: bring even more students back onto campus in January and February. They say lessons learned from the fall will allow them to offer a more traditional college experience in the next semester.

The University of California, San Diego, is making room for more than 11,000 students in campus housing — about 1,000 more than it housed in the fall. The University of Florida is planning to offer more face-to-face classes than it did before the pandemic. And Princeton University, which let only a few hundred students live on campus last semester, has offered space to thousands of undergraduates.

“What makes me optimistic is we had the virus in our community, and each time we did, we were able to stop transmissions dead,” said David Greene, president of Colby College in Maine, which brought its whole student body back in the fall using aggressive health measures, and plans to do the same again next semester.

Many institutions are choosing not to bring back more students, planning instead to hunker down over the winter as infections mount and the nation awaits a vaccine. The University of Michigan, which spent a rocky fall trying to keep thousands of students on campus, has told most of its students to stay home and study remotely next semester.

But the alternative has been particularly compelling for schools that managed the fall with relatively minimal infections, and the schools that watched and learned from them.

Students have proved more conscientious than the public may think, administrators say. The culture of fraternities, big sports and big parties remains a challenge, but at many schools, students themselves reported the majority of health violations.

Many university officials say they are also increasingly confident that the virus is not being transmitted in classrooms, where professors are enforcing mask wearing and social distancing rules.

“The spread is in teacher break rooms, in fraternities and sororities,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama administration and is now president of a global health initiative to prevent heart disease and epidemics. “It’s not even in organized sports but in locker rooms before and pizza parties after.”

— Anemona Hartocollis and Shawn Hubler The New York Times