At a media briefing held on April 8, 2021, Assistant Vice President for Risk Management, Safety and Transportation Programs, Daniel Nichols, announced that the UPass program will be reintroduced in the Fall of 2021.
“After extensive discussions with WMATA we’re pleased to announce that we are going to restart the program in fall of 2021 and it will go through spring of 2022,” said Nichols.
Fanta Aw, vice president of campus life & inclusive excellence at the office of campus life, said “We are actively engaged in working on a fall return and knowing the different pieces of the student experience that really are critical to a successful fall return, and one of those is the UPass program.”
The UPass program has been in place at American University since 2016 and was suspended throughout Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Nichols, the program will be “back to the way it was pre-pandemic,” and will remain the same price as previous years. “We’ve been able to negotiate the same price, it will be one dollar a day for all full-time undergraduate and graduate students, and that works out to 136 days per semester which is inclusive of the law school calendar.”
Information about safe distribution to students who qualify for the UPass will be issued at a later date.