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William Widmer/The New York Times/Redux
The Atlantic
What if Colleges don’t Reopen Until 2021?
Millions of families face a question that was once unthinkable.
Adam Harris
April 24, 2020
Every two years, New Jersey’s higher-education secretary expects the
state’s school administrators to present contingency plans for disaster
scenarios. Dorm fires, mass shootings, extreme weather events—all types
of threats are considered by these college representatives. University
presidents, deans, and others in essential management roles have
color-coordinated charts and go bags stashed in their offices. They
conduct tabletop exercises: When do we cancel classes? Should we send
students home? But these leaders weren’t adequately prepared for the
onset of a pandemic, nor for the large-scale, indefinite shutdown that
has taken place.
Overall, colleges have responded quickly to the multifaceted
coronavirus threat. Universities swiftly moved classes online, canceled
spring sports, and instructed students to vacate their dorm rooms.
(Some institutions refunded fees for on-campus housing, or found ways
to get study-abroad students home.) Still, shutting down was the easy
part. Now administrators have to figure what their institutions will do
once this semester ends. “If you were to design a place to make sure
that everyone gets the virus, it would look like a nursing home or a
campus,” Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire
University, which has more than 130,000 students enrolled online, told
me yesterday.
When university presidents are asked whether they’ll open their
campuses for the fall 2020 semester, most couch their answers in
conditionals and assumptions. By now they’ve realized that they can’t
just open for business on September 1 and let everyone rush back onto
campus like excited Black Friday shoppers. Ohio State President Michael
Drake suggested he might start bringing professors back to campus in a
few weeks. Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, said he
would reopen its campus in the fall and separate those older than 35
from those younger. But even he called the declaration “preliminary.”
When there are tens of thousands of dollars at stake for students and
their families, I don’t know is not a satisfying answer. Why would
students plunge themselves into years of debt for an online education
instead of the full college experience they signed up for? Some
soon-to-be high-school graduates have proposed taking a gap year, but
for a lot of students—low-income students, minority students, adult
students—that is not a practical option.
If students are able to walk onto campuses in the fall, they might not
recognize the universities they’ve enrolled in. Arenas and auditoriums
may be converted into lecture halls, which would allow students to
avoid cramped classrooms and spread out. Hotels could become
dormitories so that students can have their own rooms and bathrooms
with limited exposure to germs. Then there’s the question of
sports—specifically, the multimillion-dollar college-football industry.
“Talking to some of my colleagues who run big-time Division I programs,
they’re really sweating this out, because those television revenues are
big dollars,” LeBlanc, who also chairs the board of the American
Council on Education, the nation’s largest higher-education
coordinating body, told me. Clemson’s head football coach, Dabo
Swinney, has been adamant that the school will be playing games in the
fall. But even in that unlikely scenario, teams would likely play to
empty stadiums.
Walter Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University, in New Orleans,
told me he plans to use the chapel on campus that was renovated after
Katrina—and can now accommodate 800 people—for large lecture courses
where students can remain socially distant. That might be easy for
smaller colleges like Dillard, whose “large” classes are about 50
people, but at state flagship universities, it’s unrealistic. Kimbrough
also told me his plan is tentative; if returning to campus is too
risky, the university will continue to operate online.
Many colleges are building out their online infrastructure with
incomplete data. College leaders are leaning on research about the best
practices for online learning to guide their strategies, but that
research does not account for the multilayered disruption of a
pandemic. College-from-home becomes a radically different undertaking
when students have been laid off from jobs and are now home trying to
figure out child care. (Nearly one in four undergraduate students has
children.)
LeBlanc, from Southern New Hampshire University, said he fields many
calls from other school leaders asking how his institution conducts
courses online. They rarely ask him about the other services that
students learning online need, though; counseling, tutoring, and
mental-health support are afterthoughts, he told me. The colleges and
universities where students are most in need of these additional
services may be the ones hardest hit financially by the crisis: junior
colleges, nonselective private colleges, and public regional
universities. New Jersey state lawmakers, for example, have already
announced that they will place 50 percent of the funding for state
colleges in reserve until September 30, the end of the fiscal year.
John Thelin, a University of Kentucky professor and the author of the
definitive History of American Higher Education, told me that he’s
never seen anything like the dual crisis colleges are facing right now.
If this were just a public-health crisis or a financial crisis,
institutions likely would have been fine. The two combined, however,
have produced an unprecedented disruption. “Colleges are prepared for
dramatic, catastrophic events. What they’re not prepared for are
drawn-out things that are less spectacular, but that really cannibalize
their operations and their budgets,” he said. And unlike hurricanes or
tornadoes, which may affect one city or state, this crisis is affecting
the whole higher-education sector, so institutions have limited ability
to help one another out.
Ironically, the disruption to higher education most comparable to the
present situation in scale might be the boom in college enrollment
after World War II, Thelin said. When Congress passed the GI Bill, in
1944, government officials underestimated just how many students would
take advantage of the scholarship program embedded in the legislation.
From 1940 to 1950, the number of Americans earning degrees each year
more than doubled, from 200,000 to 500,000. Some universities tripled
or quadrupled in size. Indiana University, for example, grew from 3,000
students in 1944 to more than 10,000 in 1946.
Now college administrators are looking at the inverse possibility.
They’re scrapping plans for growth in service of public health. They’re
moving operations online. Nobody wants to be the first to reopen, nor
the first to say they’re going remote until 2021 or later. “A lot of
places have the capacity to reopen in normal circumstances,” LeBlanc
told me. “But we’re not going to flip a switch and go from ‘everyone
shelter at home’ to ‘everybody go back to what you used to be doing
three months ago.’”
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