Toddlers and children are not potent vectors for spreading the coronavirus, the latest evidence suggests, but adolescents and young adults are. Yet even as kindergartens everywhere remain closed, college campuses are reopening.
But there’s an asterisk. Colleges, in truth, clearly have no intention of being genuinely open once they’ve cashed students’ rent and tuition checks.
Countless students have paid full tuition, room, and board. Some did so after being threatened with the loss of their place at their school. Others were promised that they could learn either while socially distanced or live on campus. Unfortunately, students are instead being sent back to an inferior online education session. Or, worse, they are being sent home deeper in debt, to infect homes full of older people.
This is because, wholly predictably, COVID-19 is erupting in frat houses and packed university apartments. There, they will mostly be nonfatal. Once students take the disease home, that will less often be the case.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the colleges are a cartel, and they are engaged in a bait and switch. They promise they’re not like other schools, doomed to shut down. But then they shut down. The seeds of this grift were probably sown at the start of the pandemic.
Last May, NYU business professor and celebrity tech commentator Scott Galloway warned in an interview with New York magazine that the coronavirus was expediting the colleges’ grifting. “At universities, we’re having constant meetings, and we’ve all adopted this narrative of ‘This is unprecedented, and we’re in this together,’ which is Latin for ‘We’re not lowering our prices,’” Galloway said. “Universities are still in a period of consensual hallucination, with each saying, ‘We’re going to maintain these prices for what has become, overnight, a dramatically less compelling product offering.’”
Four months later, Galloway’s prediction has largely proven correct. Elite universities are charging full tuition, some even adding extra costs, yet are obliging their students to operate remotely. The few that committed to in-person learning have initiated something even worse.
In some cases, this has been more an overt threat than a conniving ruse. Take Notre Dame. After getting students to commit to more than $55,000 of tuition, Notre Dame reversed its reopening plans once the students (who, again, seemingly risk less than half a percent chance of dying if they do contract the coronavirus) predictably started getting infected. At least Notre Dame is finally trying in-person classes again, starting next week. But will the Irish stick it out through the next outbreak? Other schools, such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pulled the same bait and switch.
If you’re a student or parent agonizing over whether to pull the trigger, pay up, and return to campus, you are right to be highly skeptical. Bait and switch isn’t the exclusive preserve of A- and B-list universities. According to data tracked by Davidson College and the Chronicle of Higher Education, the plurality of higher education institutions (27%) are reopening “primarily online.” The second-largest share of schools, 24%, “have still not yet finalized their plans.”
The only subset of schools with a plurality planning to operate primarily in person is that of private nonprofit, four-year schools.
To recap, schools that already charge an arm and a leg for a degree already of questionable value spent the summer selling the fantasy that 19-year-olds would move into dorms and frat houses, and no one would contract a disease that has become a global pandemic. These colleges created no actual plan to prevent this from happening, and they are now either kicking students back to their hometowns to infect others or forcing them to settle for online learning at the in-person price.
If any other type of business did such a thing, there would be a rash of fraud prosecutions.
