Colleges and universities have become grifters during the coronavirus pandemic, as we’ve written before. Now, even worse, their greed could cost lives by fueling a big new wave of infections.
They faced a dilemma as the fall semester approached. No protocols could plausibly be expected to stop college students getting together with one another. And dorms don’t have sufficient room for social distancing. Outbreaks of COVID-19 were inevitable. But colleges desperately wanted to continue charging exorbitant tuition fees and knew they couldn’t do that entirely with online learning. What parent would shell out upwards of $70,000 for their children to live at home and watch video lectures that can be bought elsewhere for a fraction of the cost?
So college administrators pulled a classic con artist’s bait and switch. They asked college students to return to campus and bilked parents out of full-freight fees with the promise that at least some instruction would be in-person rather than online. Shortly before school opened, with the money safely in the bank, they shifted exclusively or at least nearly exclusively to online instruction, but asked students to come back to campus anyway.
Within weeks, there have been massive outbreaks of coronavirus infection. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, positive tests have surged to about 20% of the student body; that’s over 1,000 cases. Indiana University reported over 1,200 by Sept. 8, with 1 in 4 fraternity members testing positive. At the University of Alabama, over 2,000 students have tested positive.
This was entirely predictable. College students who had been cooped up in their parents’ homes for six months weren’t going to return to campus and obey social distancing guidelines. Schools that should have known better — they sell themselves as being smart and able to teach — are trying to slough off all the blame on to students.
The University of Alabama sanctioned 600 students for violating COVID-19 rules. Indiana University warned that students who attended a pontoon boat party over Labor Day weekend could be sanctioned. Northeastern University went as far as to expel 11 students who were found together at a hotel in Boston — without refunding their tuition money, of course.
University scam artists are effectively trying to scapegoat college students after they themselves lured students back to campus on false promises and no realistic hope of preventing infections.
The good news, thus far, is that COVID-19 cases among students have been overwhelmingly mild and have not led to any sort of spike in hospital admissions or deaths, which is consistent with the global experience with young people and this disease.
The bad and enraging news, though, is that universities are debating whether to send students home. Some have already taken action along these lines. James Madison University told students to go home, Chico State University in California has given students a week to vacate dorms, and Indiana University is pushing to close all fraternity and sorority houses.
Given how rare it is for college students to get severely ill from COVID-19, the best thing for them now is to stay on campus where their youth shields them from danger. Sending exposed students back to their communities, however, where they would interact with older and more vulnerable people, is a recipe for many more infections of the most dangerous kind. It is the nightmare scenario public health officials envisaged as they contemplated the potential for a second wave.
“It’s the worst thing you could do,” Anthony Fauci explained on NBC’s Today Show. “When you send them home, particularly when you’re dealing with a university where people come from multiple different locations, you could be seeding the different places with infection.”
Having students come back to campus while maintaining online classes just to collect tuition was bad enough. But now that students are on campus and getting sick, sending them home to their communities where they can become a broader threat to public health goes beyond mere grift and becomes reckless irresponsibility.
