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Jim R. Bounds / Bloomberg / Getty
The Atlantic
America Will Sacrifice Anything for the College Experience
The pandemic has revealed that higher education was never about education.
Story by Ian Bogost
Oct. 20, 2020
American colleges botched the pandemic from the very start. Caught off
guard in the spring, most of them sent everyone home in a panic, in
some cases evicting students who had nowhere else to go. School leaders
hemmed and hawed all summer about what to do next and how to do it. In
the end, most schools reopened their campuses for the fall, and when
students returned, they brought the coronavirus along with them. Come
Labor Day, 19 of the nation’s 25 worst outbreaks were in college towns,
including the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Iowa State in Ames,
and the University of Georgia in Athens. By early October, the White
House Coronavirus Task Force estimated that as many as 20 percent of
all Georgia college students might have become infected.
Who’s to blame for the turmoil? College leaders desperate to enroll
students or risk financial collapse; students, feeling young and
invincible, who were bound to be dumb and throw parties; red-state
governments and boards that pressured universities to reopen.
But ordinary Americans also bear responsibility. They didn’t just want
classes to resume in person—they wanted campuses to return to normal.
By one measure, more than two-thirds of students wanted to head back to
their colleges. Even parents deeply worried about the safety of their
kids still packed bags and road-tripped across the country to drop them
off at school. When some colleges moved to Zoom, students and parents
revolted. More than 100 colleges, both private (Brown, Duke) and public
(Rutgers, North Carolina), have been sued for tuition refunds. You can
understand why. It costs almost $60,000 per year to attend Brown, and
that’s before room, board, books, and fees.
But what did families think they were paying for? Classes are still
happening, and degrees will still be conferred. Parents and students
are miffed because they don’t really buy teaching when they pay
tuition. Instead, they get something more abstract: the college
experience. Some of that experience involves education—the seminar
discussion in a facsimile of a medieval monastery, the cram session
under the vaulted ceiling of a library, the brisk, after-class chat
with a professor across a grassy quad. But most of it doesn’t,
especially the stuff that can’t be done from a distance, such as moving
away from home for the first time, swilling booze at a house party,
touring houses during sorority rush, applying face paint for a football
game, decorating the cold, cinder-block walls of a new dorm room.
The pandemic is changing lots of things, some forever. Office work
seems to be on the decline, as companies abandon pricey real estate and
the nuisance of commutes. Online grocery shopping, once a luxury, may
finally be deposing the supermarket’s century-long reign. The pandemic
has upended air travel, dining out, working out, and weddings. But even
though the coronavirus has massively disrupted American higher
education, many colleges are already settling back into their usual
routines: move-in day, rush, homecoming, and all the rest.
That shocking stability is exposing a long-standing disconnect: Without
the college experience, a college education alone seems insufficient.
Quietly, higher education was always an excuse to justify the college
lifestyle. But the pandemic has revealed that university life is far
more embedded in the American idea than anyone thought. America is
deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less
interested in the education for which students supposedly attend.
Students do go to school for the schooling, of course. Colleges hold
classes, host majors, and award degrees. Getting a college degree is
now one of the only paths to a middle-class life, training graduates
for a particular career and, on average, doubling their median income.
But that’s just a small part of colleges’ purpose. In the United
States, higher education offers a fantasy for how kids should grow up:
by competing for admission to a rarefied place, which erects a safe
cocoon that facilitates debauchery and self-discovery, out of which an
adult emerges. The process—not just the result, a degree—offers access
to opportunity, camaraderie, and even matrimony. Partying, drinking,
sex, clubs, fraternities: These rites of passage became an American
birthright.
Not everyone gets or even wants a college experience. At least 35
percent of American students attend two-year institutions such as
junior and community colleges that don’t promise a coming-of-age
experience. Likewise, some state schools cater to commuter students,
working students, and students outside traditional college age, for
whom a college experience is either a luxury or a memory. That’s what
made it easy for the California State University system—all 23
campuses, serving almost half a million students total—to move fall
classes online way back in May.
By the time the pandemic arrived, residential colleges had been selling
the college experience, along with a side of education, for decades.
They had been promulgating it as a cultural aspiration for much longer.
An education is useful and even beneficial. But it’s not what American
colleges are built for, and it never has been.
When Western universities got their start in medieval Europe, they were
integrated into major cities, such as Paris, Berlin, and Milan. England
was an exception. Its oldest colleges, Oxford and Cambridge, were
nestled into the bucolic countryside. When Harvard became the first
college in the future United States, it adopted the English notion of a
campus as a place apart—and became the prototype for every U.S.
undergraduate college that succeeded it. The school was designed around
a quadrangle (an Oxford-Cambridge invention) that literally contains
collegiate life, separated from the outside but connected within.
The massive size of the United States set the stage for hundreds, then
thousands, of schools all across the country: sectarian schools
connected to every church, state universities to keep future leaders
closer to home, small-town colleges to draw settlers, land-grant
institutions to spur economies. Colleges helped even the smallest, most
isolated communities cosplay classical city-states—thus all the college
towns named Athens, Rome, and Oxford.
A common thread unites these residential colleges: Their campuses live
in tension with their communities because American colleges and
universities have always sought isolation rather than integration.
College is a place like Las Vegas is a place: a host for the lifestyle
it provides. Even schools in the middle of big cities, such as Rice
University in Houston or the University of Southern California in Los
Angeles, almost always offer deliberate separation from their urban
environments. These places see and sell themselves as hamlets decoupled
from the rest of the world. They need to maintain that myth in order to
provide the college experience in undiluted form—even while they also
host massive flows of people, ideas, and capital in and out of their
gates.
Even for people who might never attend college, a proliferation of
isolated American campuses helped make college an ambition. Relatively
small populations went to college before the 1950s, but the popular
fascination with collegiate life was widespread. “It was showcased,
kind of like looking at an aquarium,” says John Thelin, a University of
Kentucky historian who studies higher education. The college way became
a lifestyle. “Every magazine would have a back-to-college issue”
covering style, fashion, and slang. Joe College and Betty Co-ed became
archetypes, young and carefree models of American spirit and potential.
Going to college, Thelin writes in his book A History of American
Higher Education, “was a rite of passage into the prestige of the
American upper-middle class.”
Sports helped establish the traditions of that rite of passage, such as
fight songs and homecoming. Adults can’t attend school forever, but
they can root for their alma mater in perpetuity. Land-grant-college
football teams, including the Texas A&M Aggies and the LSU Tigers,
also helped fill a gap in pro sports; until 1960, there were no NFL
teams south of St. Louis. For many, sports make college understandable
and appealing in the first place.
As more people enrolled in college during the mid-20th century,
becoming a student escalated from an upper-middle-class to a
middle-class aspiration. State schools had made higher ed accessible.
The G.I. Bill and Pell grants made it affordable. The college
experience became permanent through alumni, as children and
grandchildren were encouraged to dream of their parents’ alma mater,
major, or Greek house. And schools encouraged this, eager for the
attention, the donations, and the built-in marketing of their legacy.
The entire structure of American family life became oriented toward
college—school districts drove home-buying decisions; teen schedules
swelled with SAT prep and extracurriculars. Adult life became anchored
to college, too, by its tendency to matchmake marriages, through jobs
secured from one’s course of study, via local or regional settlement
after graduation, by the legacy of collegiate-sports fandom, and from
the lifelong shadow of the alma mater as a crucible of adulthood.
Americans perceive college as a shared cultural experience because it
is one. You might graduate after four years, but in a way you never
leave—even if you didn’t attend in the first place.
But overnight, the pandemic threatened what it means to attend college.
Colleges and universities knew that bringing students across the
country to campus during a deadly pandemic was a terribly risky
prospect. But most of them did it anyway, largely in the interest of
providing the cherished college experience, even if most or all classes
took place online. Schools tried to place restrictions on what students
could do: spreading them out in dorms, installing useless plexiglass
barriers on lecterns, prohibiting parties, and canceling campus events.
(But not football. All ten Division 1 conferences are playing this
fall.)
And so move-in day took place, the masks came off, the football games
proceeded, and college kids started partying right away. Some schools
kept the virus in check, but at others, it spread fast. Almost a third
of COVID-19 tests at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
came back positive soon after the semester began. An outbreak at Notre
Dame, one of the first campuses to commit to a return to campus,
temporarily pushed instruction online almost immediately after classes
had started. The spread also justified an extreme curtailment of campus
life. Schools implicitly promised the college experience to get
students back, but when students arrived they ruined things by being
there and partaking of it. Students were confined to their dorms, save
for eating and going to classes or work. Faced with college as a
prison, some students have rebelled, and some schools have retaliated.
In September, Northeastern University expelled 11 students for hosting
a party in violation of COVID-safety policies, because it put even a
modified college experience at risk.
From off-campus, some outsiders objected on the grounds that not
partying is also a threat to that experience. Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis threatened to introduce a college-student bill of rights that
would protect students against draconian responses like Northeastern’s.
“That’s what college kids do,” he said of partying students, casting
the pandemic as a battle for their fate. He wasn’t alone. The Trump
administration leaned on state governments to reopen colleges. Georgia
Governor Brian Kemp dangled the University of Georgia’s football season
as a carrot for public-health compliance. Connecticut Governor Ned
Lamont even wanted Yale to reopen.
It might seem ludicrous to sacrifice public health to preserve
indiscretion as an ideal of college life, but that life has never
aspired toward well-being in the first place. It’s a deliberate feature
of college, not a side effect. “Youthful indiscretions were tolerated
and even encouraged as part of the process of upward social mobility
that the college facilitated,” Thelin writes.
The pandemic made some parts of the traditional college experience,
such as parties and close-quarters socialization, dangerous. But campus
life thrives on dangerous behavior in the first place. College creates
a bubble that upends responsibility to the outside world. Students
acted recklessly toward the virus not because they are necessarily
careless or juvenile, but because college promises them a place apart,
where ordinary rules don’t apply. For example, after public-health
officials in Boulder, Colorado banned gatherings of 18-to-22-year-olds
in an effort to control the spread outside the college community,
students only felt more entitled to gather in groups. The pandemic’s
restrictions were almost guaranteed to inspire college kids to organize
parties that reject the structures of adult authority.
As the leaves turn and fall arrives in earnest, colleges and
universities are starting to understand what measures are needed to
prevent outbreaks on their campuses and in their communities. The
answer isn’t surprising: frequent, widespread testing for people with
and without symptoms, backed by contact tracing of infected students.
As of mid-October, the University of Georgia, for example, had reported
more than 3,800 cases since March. But by comparison, at Georgia Tech,
where I teach, researchers created a high-volume surveillance testing
program, and the institute has reported about 65 percent fewer cases
per capita. Other schools, such as Cornell, have also used surveillance
testing to great effect. But there are over 5,000 colleges and
universities in America, and not all of them can respond like an elite
school can. The drive to open campuses at all costs during a pandemic
shows how deeply higher education has sunk its claws into the American
imagination. We’ve built a large part of our society around the
experience of college, but precious little around the education it
provides.
That’s why college won’t go the way of white-collar offices or gyms or
grocery shopping, no matter what some prognosticators have predicted
amid the catastrophe. The NYU business professor Scott Galloway has
contended that most colleges will die out, and the survivors will
partner with big tech companies such as Apple and Google to take over
the sector. John Warner, a higher-ed critic, hopes for an opposite
future of sustainable, state-funded education. In a new book, he argues
that colleges are under threat because “they are not oriented around
the mission of teaching and learning, but instead exist to recruit
students, enroll students, collect tuition, and hold class.”
Both diagnoses mistake college’s secondary purpose, education, for its
primary one, collegiate life. The internet’s overthrow of college has
been foretold for more than a decade now, long before the pandemic
moved classes to Zoom. But instead, online learning has mostly become a
way to spare commuter students the travel or to attract mid-career
students to professional programs—neither of which ever tried to
deliver the college experience of American myth. Appealing to
educational renewal, meanwhile, overlooks the hard truth that the
collegiate way never lost its way; teaching and learning’s central role
was always somewhat mythical, no matter how much critics such as Warner
might wish things used to be otherwise.
The pandemic has made college frail, but it has strengthened Americans’
awareness of their attachment to the college experience. It has shown
the whole nation, all at once, how invested they are in going away to
school or dreaming about doing so. Facing that revelation might be the
most important outcome of the pandemic for higher ed: An education may
take place at college, but that’s not what colleges principally
provide. Higher education survived a civil war, two world wars, the
Great Depression, and the 1918 Spanish flu, the worst pandemic the U.S.
has ever faced. American colleges will outlast this crisis, too,
whether or not they are safe, whether or not they are affordable, and
whether or not you or your children actually attend them. The pandemic
offered an invitation to construe college as an education alone,
because it was too dangerous to embrace it as an experience. Nobody was
interested. They probably never will be.
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