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The Atlantic
An Urgent Time for a Year Off Campus
College students have a chance to serve their country. Bring on the CoronaCorps.
Ellen Ruppel Shell, Journalism professor at Boston University
May 30, 2020
American higher education has coped with major international
emergencies before. During World War II, students left in droves to
enlist—and then returned, after the war, eager to resume their formal
schooling. (In 1947, nearly half of all admitted college students were
veterans.) The United States is now suffering through another crisis of
enormous magnitude. Congress has already passed $2 trillion in relief
and is considering more. And yet colleges and universities from coast
to coast appear bent on muddling through—that is, either by reopening
their campus despite the dangers or by patching together enough online
offerings to put on a facsimile of a fall semester.
This is a dismal choice. What colleges and the federal government
should acknowledge is that, for many students, neither option makes
sense. Given the nature and scale of the crisis facing the country,
college students should be strongly urged to take a break from
full-time study and devote the next year to national service, with
online courses playing a cameo role.
The United States already has an infrastructure for supporting this:
The AmeriCorps program, founded during the Clinton administration,
offers stipends that can be applied toward tuition or directly to
students. A massive emergency expansion of this program—into what might
be called the CoronaCorps—would give the nation’s roughly 20 million
public- and private-college students a meaningful year off campus and
keep colleges and universities afloat without summoning large numbers
of people back to tightly packed classrooms and dorms. CoronaCorps
participants would still enroll in a course or two online, but their
main focus should be community needs that no one is meeting.
Future educators might assist public-school teachers in everything from
tech support to tutoring. Aspiring health-care professionals could
assume roles in the national effort to trace the contacts of people who
test positive for the coronavirus. Budding environmentalists and
naturalists could maintain hiking trails, plant trees, test water
quality, and refurbish public campgrounds. Students preparing for a
career in disaster relief could be trained to assist in rescues,
forest-fire mitigation, and other emergency functions. The artistically
inclined could organize outdoor performances. Future social workers
could minister to the elderly, if only remotely, or assist in caring
for the children of teachers, health-care professionals, and other
essential workers. Those headed for roles in hospitality might prepare
and distribute food, or work in hotels maintained for medical
providers. Communications majors might draw up, produce, and
disseminate public-information campaigns. Students unsure of their
interests might fill entry-level roles in underserved sectors, from
logistics to agriculture to construction.
Spending a year of their life in such service projects is not what most
college students would normally have chosen, but this is not a normal
year. Students are willing to help; in a survey conducted this month,
the Panetta Institute for Public Policy found that three out of five
current college students had a desire to perform public service in
exchange for help with tuition. Now could be their chance. What better
way for students to deal with the trauma of this horrifying pandemic
than for them to see themselves not as a problem to be solved, but as a
vital part of the solution.
College campuses are petri dishes. The dorms, the dining halls, the
libraries, the labs, the gyms all incubators of infection. So
administrators at the nation’s colleges and universities will have a
difficult time ensuring safety if the virus does not abate by summer’s
end. Some institutions insist that they will reopen anyway. A few, such
as the California State University system, have announced that they
will not hold in-person classes next fall. Many more have instructed
faculty to reimagine courses for a hybrid audience—with students unable
or unwilling to attend class being offered courses either partially or
fully online. I used Zoom to teach last semester, and it worked fine in
a pinch. But Zoom and similar platforms are no substitute for the
college experience, whose value lies in students’ serendipitous
mingling with faculty, staff, and one another.
As an educator, I’ve heard various responses from families to these
options, ranging from fear to approval to utter confusion. Most parents
are reluctant to expose their kids to any level of risk, but also
reluctant to pay full tuition for online classes. Yet every parent I
speak with seems resigned to settle for whatever option they can
afford. As one mother told me, “There are no jobs, no internships. What
the hell else is [my daughter] going to do?”
Michael J. Sorrell: Colleges are deluding themselves
So why do so many university administrators insist on opening their
doors next fall? One obvious answer is money. In recent years, rising
tuition and fear of accruing debt have led to a decline in student
numbers. Approximately 250,000 fewer college students enrolled in 2019
than in 2018. Administrators fear that a semester without tuition will
accelerate this downward trend, and push many vulnerable colleges over
the edge. That fear is justified: A recent survey concluded that
roughly one-third of private, four-year American colleges are at risk
of sinking within the year.
What is puzzling is that much of the rhetoric rationalizing the
reopening of colleges emphasizes not these very real financial
concerns, but the supposed duty of the academy to serve students and
their needs with traditional coursework, often in a residential
setting. Surely that duty ended with the pandemic, replaced by a duty
to keep students, faculty, staff, and their families safe from the
worst pandemic in living memory—and, perhaps, to prepare students for a
year-long tour of duty in national service matched to their skills and
interests.
Just last month, a group of lawmakers proposed the Pandemic Response
and Opportunity Through National Service Act, which would offer major
increases in funding for AmeriCorps and other service-related
initiatives.
AmeriCorps typically offers 75,000 volunteers up to $6,195 toward
student loans or a degree, a relative pittance that many colleges and
universities voluntarily match, or even exceed. The new legislation
proposes growing the number of service opportunities to 750,000 and
more than tripling the education award, to $20,880, roughly twice the
national average of in-state tuition and fees at public universities.
This and other costs would require an estimated additional investment
of $7 billion a year. “That’s not even a rounding error in the $4
trillion of new federal spending,” says Senator Chris Coons of
Delaware, one of nine Democrats who introduced the bill, which has
received bipartisan support. And costs would shrink significantly if
student volunteers were encouraged to remain in their family home,
thereby reducing the need for a cost-of-living stipend.
Coons told me that AmeriCorps could be “retooled for the pandemic” to
allow students to front-load some part of their educational award to
cover current tuition at participating colleges and universities. He
likened this idea to another major federal intervention in higher
education: the law that offers tuition to those who serve in the
military. “The GI Bill was one of the most popular pieces of
legislation in the nation’s history,” he said. “I’ve never met an
American who even questioned it. This would be something similar, but
for national service.”
Many colleges and universities encourage undergraduates to take
internships, often for academic credit. In a CoronaCorps scenario, they
would receive credit for their service, as well as for the one or two
courses they take online each semester. In exchange, colleges and
universities would collect tuition, though at a discounted rate to
account for the lack of on-campus support and activities, as well as
the lightened course load. All parties involved would need to adjust
their expectations—financial and otherwise—but that is what a global
crisis requires.
Any initiative that scales up rapidly in weeks or months will be
improvised to some degree. Still, two decades of experience with
AmeriCorps provides a useful foundation for a much larger emergency
initiative; a spokesperson for AmeriCorps and Senior Corps, a sister
entity that deploys retirees, noted that the programs are currently
performing service in 45,000 locations around the country. The task of
scaling up the program for a significant fraction of the nation’s
college students is daunting, but it’s clearly less dangerous than all
these students returning to campus. And it’s likely more realistic than
the elaborate systems of weekly testing, isolation, and regular
student, faculty, and staff quarantines that some schools are now
contriving.
A CoronaCorps year would help keep universities and colleges afloat and
students engaged through a difficult period. It would afford young
people the all-too-rare opportunity to act independently and with a
clear sense of purpose. It would open their minds, expand their views,
and teach them to grapple with complexity in an uncertain world. And
crucially, it would give them the chance to perform service whose
primary purpose is not to enrich their résumé, but to enrich others’
lives—and their own.
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