More: https://hms.harvard.edu/coronavirus/coronavirus-communications
However it would make strategic sense for richer colleges to accelerate the differentiation with weaker colleges by digging into their endowments at this time. Perhaps not very “collegial” but entirely necessary if there is going to be a shakeout and fewer donors in the future.
Unfortunately administrators (and university presidents) are motivated to see the size of the endowment as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. This paper gives a good explanation of the phenomenon, showing that endowments cut back in bad times in contravention of their stated policies to smooth their payouts over time, while using smoothing as an excuse not to pay out more in good times. In some cases it appears that it is linked to whether or not the endowment has grown during the term of the university president: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.104.3.931
Before I go back to the questions I left off with – there are a lot of posts here basically urging profs/staff to go back and make college on-campus for the kids and pointing at general trends as why we ought to do it. The problem with that, beyond the narrow self-interestedness of it, is that when we look at campus, we’re not thinking of broad trends and a few lives lost. We’re thinking of whether or not we want, personally, to risk serious organ damage, long-term disability, or death so that the kids can have The College Campus Experience. If it were impossible for people to learn otherwise, we’d likely be more willing to risk our lives and to move away from our families to keep them safe while we taught. But it isn’t impossible.
You can pretty much save the threats of our going homeless or starving or losing our careers or whatever. We’ve already thought about these things. As I said before, you can come back from unemployment. Other things, not so much.
Okay, so to recap my questions:
The two questions left, it seems to me, are:
- How long does this go on?
- How are we going to sort the COA money?
The answer to 1 is “we don’t know.” At a minimum, we’ll need to understand this virus and/or disease well enough to have a reliable treatment for it. Nobody knows when that will happen.
However, 2 will force some long-overdue conversations. If you take “we would still like to have universities at the end of this” as an endpoint, someone has to pay to maintain physical and staffing assets. You might be deeply shocked to find out how expensive they are, even though most university staff and faculty could in fact make more money elsewhere (normally).
The science facilities at small and public universities were already in trouble because they rely so heavily on federal funding, which is competitive to a point, and don’t have $8bn endowments and ranks of obscenely wealthy alumni donors. But there will probably be federal money, through the science agencies, to help keep core operations going. (Collins is already signalling about that from NIH.) Since science grants also pay to maintain part of the campus facilities generally, there will be some federal-agency help there, but it won’t be enough to keep all the science programs running or all the buildings maintained.
The staffing for liberal arts colleges is the majority of the budget. There will be, in some cases are, furloughs, and there will likely be program and course-listing cuts here and there, but keep in mind we’re already coming off decades of cuts, and consider how annoyed you get when your kid wants to study something and it’s not offered at his university.
Then there are student services and the entire “campus experience”, a very American thing that’s a bit of a hangover from days when only rich kids went to college and then the happy, well-funded ‘60s and ‘70s. Dorms, clubs, fields, student unions, big events and parties, spectacular gyms, visiting big-name speakers, etc. We’ve tried to democratize that good time, then make it luxurious, even if it’s fake-luxurious, but it’s all quite expensive. Then there are the services that are genuinely democratic and expand access to college: disability support, ELL, Title IX, family services, food banks, counseling services, diversity offices, teacher-training in supporting students with disabilities, students in poverty, and students with claims on their time beyond school. Then there are the relevance projects for the many, many students who aren’t raring to work their ways up from the mailroom to the boardroom: career services, internship services, study-abroad offices, etc. Then there are the success-management services: intensive help and steering so students find majors and manage to graduate, get competitive fellowships and prizes, and get into their grad and professional schools. Then there are the professional-experiences expenses: sending forty students to a conference where they can present their work, build resumes, and meet the people who might hire them.
Then there’s the entire marketing, recruiting, bridge-to-college, admissions, and fin aid apparatus, because without it only rich kids could go to college now. Again. Let’s not forget the stipends and benefits for the graduate students, without which they wouldn’t go to grad school, and without whom the federal research funding would evaporate.
Then there’s collegiate sports, which at many schools run their own budgets, but still rely on the university for facilities and services for making their athletes all look like real students.
Which parts do you want to give up? Which parts are you willing to pay significantly more in taxes for?
More to the point, which parts do your kids think are the important parts?
The state governments will be on life support themselves and I think cannot be counted on to be heroes in this picture even if they want to be. They must and should rescue K-12 and other basic services first.
University people know a lot about their ends of universities; parents generally know a lot less about how universities work; a pretty tiny group of people are able to make the connections between “university educations now” and “benefit for living in a world that will almost certainly change radically over the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years.”
As we wade further into these conversations and arguments — and there should be arguments, these things are important — we’ll get to the secondary fights: who should be able to have what things? And who should decide where the cutoffs are, and how?
It will be important to approach these questions with an open mind and a readiness to believe that something you absolutely know for dead certain is in fact wrong in most cases. It will also be important that the kids themselves have a loud voice in this conversation. It is after all their futures, and they understand now better, in many respects, than we do. An accidental blessing: the voices of so many Boomers, whose college educations were not only deeply formative but happened on a different planet, will for the first time not be so loud. I think we can get somewhere with this if there’s will to avoid destructive fighting and utter selfishness.
It will also be important to remain engaged in this conversation after your kids are done with school. This is a 10-year conversation at least.
As for what it’ll cost you, personally: much more than you think it’s worth, I’m guessing. You’re going to feel robbed even after the universities stab themselves budgetwise till they’re bleeding, and even though you’re going to save the hotel/restaurant part of the college cruise bill. You’ll be absolutely shocked by the line items, which, on inspection, will dissolve into pretty reasonable numbers most of the time.
I recommend that you think about how much of this is about your own notion of what college was for you vs. what your kid is looking at and will use. Your kid already wasn’t going to have your good time. The world had already changed. This is a much more serious change. But you’re going to have to stop looking at “college” as “the thing I did in 1993.” It’s a different thing now, for how long we don’t know. I guarantee that your kid is adapting, because your kid has to, and knows it.
The expense will be outrageous to you in part because you’ve got unlucky timing: everybody’s still set up for billings and expenditures from pre-virus. In part it’s outrageous because it’s outrageous: we long ago stopped supporting higher ed like other countries do, and we tacked on all that stuff that didn’t exist way back in the day.
Ah. I just got a mass email telling me that our campus food bank has reopened.
Signed,
A modern hybrid academic type teaching online, getting research grants, making just under median US HHI after being in the job nearly a decade, whose office gets janitorial treatment once a month.
This discussion is making me a tad concerned as much of my family teaches in k12 schools. I am sure that they will be open in September and I doubt that even educators with high risk factors will have the option of refusing to return and remain teaching remotely. It would seem that K12 teachers have a much higher risk of exposure, especially those who work with younger children or children with special needs. Any efforts to reduce contact would be tough to enforce, particularly in overcrowded buildings. If the more dire risk assessments are accurate, K12 teachers will have some tough decisions to make in September. Not sure how districts would handle this as some subjects already have a shortage of qualified educators available.
@katliamom @scout59 as my initial post stated, I was quoting numbers from a week ago, not today. I actually said that. Not throwing numbers around, but facts.
Harvard Medical School will be starting the upcoming semester off campus due to the coronavirus concerns. UCs and CSU as well. I think it’s highly unlikely that states with high number of cases will allow schools to reopen in September.
K-12 schools will have to open. Millions depend on them for childcare. Yes, kids have been home already since March but so have many of their parents. When jobs open back up how will parents negotiate their kids being home for school when they have to work? It’s just not sustainable. Also, when you consider how many kids rely on open schools for food that’s a whole other need that is hard to meet if there is no on campus teaching.
As far a colleges, I am surprised that California announcing their Cal States going online this fall hasn’t gained more notice. This is a very big deal that also impacts sports. But in my experience California tends to set the trend for what other states do which makes me wonder how many other schools (especially large public flagships) will end up following their lead. Yes, most schools have announced a “wait and see” approach but no school wants to stick their neck out for the liability that will come with welcoming all students back.
@chmcnm wrote:
The single biggest thing happens to be FA. Spending capital now to plug a gaping hole in the operating budget means fewer families can be helped in the future. Pure and simple. You’ll see massive layoffs before that happens. Several elite colleges have already announced hiring freezes.
@katliamom wrote:
And, your point is…? I think they already are. 
To clarify, Harvard Medical School’s first year students are starting online. But:
[quote]
we hope to be able to hold in-person research and clinical experiences for our returning medical and graduate students.
I’m sorry, I wasn’t pointing at anyone in particular, honest! There’s just so much fake news and fake data around… apologies if you meant I was going after you.
My point is… the times they are a changin’… even for the LAC students and parents on CC.
I’ve been assuming from the beginning that all K12 schools will be open and college campuses closed. I am curious how older teachers will be accommodated as they will face the same (or likely higher) risks that have been discussed regarding college faculty. The same applies to younger teachers with at risk family members.
I’m also worried about this — not only have the K12 teachers got a lot less leeway and independence than university faculty do, the districts themselves may have their hands tied by the state. A thing that alarms me is that I’m hearing nothing so far from unions.
K12 hasn’t got the money or expertise to maintain online teaching, and honestly many of the kids are just too young. You know what could use some money right now? The Children’s Television Workshop.
I don’t know whether coronavirus fits into this story, aside from a small college’s financial struggles, but BC is (basically) buying Pine Manor College (1.6 miles away). https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/bcnews/campus-community/announcements/pine-manor-institutional-agreement.html?fbclid=IwAR3HACQx4DWmpIlFEAPZeDgXyGnIyUvBlCJ-GnW92h-qeYuK4q9JaH4Ntd4
https://www.wbur.org/edify/2020/05/13/pine-manor-acquisition
Money will be the deciding factor in what stays open. So maybe only revenue producing sports at the few colleges where that is profitable. Expect much of the counseling services cut back as well, and travel for both students and faculty stops. Career services will stay open to show positive return on investment. I expect public universities will consolidate-not every branch needs to offer all subjects. Universities will stratisfy by wealth even more.
"Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of a key federal office charged with developing medical countermeasures, will testify before Congress on Thursday that the Trump administration was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic and warn that the the US will face “unprecedented illness and fatalities” without additional preparations.
“Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities,” Bright is expected to say Thursday, according to his prepared testimony obtained by CNN. “Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be darkest winter in modern history.”"
Hard to believe some on this thread are still laboring under an assumption that their kids will have anything resembling a normal on-campus experience in the upcoming school year - or that lack thereof is going to be their biggest worry.
S21 will have far more exposures in his HS with 3,500 peeps in one bldg every day for 7-8 hours, than D19 at her LAC.
Even worse…every single one of those 3,500 people will go home every night to parents and SOs that were traveling, or in office buildings, etc. and then go back to the HS the next day.
I obviously understand the need for K-12 schools to be open so parents can work, but just don’t see how the students or teachers will be safe.
Maybe in the coming college crash collegiate football and men’s collegiate basketball will be spun off as independent businesses. The great thing would be that the athletes would at last be paid.
We make them safe(r) by bringing down infections over the summer, so there are few enough infections we can test, trace, isolate them to stop outbreaks.
“College sports” is a uniquely American oxymoron. If it disappearas, then that is one aftereffect of Covid-19 we should cheer, not lament, as it would results in more meritocratic admissions process and a more academics-focused college culture.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/college-sports-benefits-white-students/573688/