Around the US, college campuses closed in mid-March. And they generally closed earlier in parts of Asia and later elsewhere around the world. When should they reopen?
The president of Brown University wrote an Op-ed piece in the NY Times (published April 26) to address this question.
I’ll only call out a few quotes and suggest you read it for yourself.
“Our students will have to understand that until a vaccine is developed, campus life will be different. Students and employees may have to wear masks on campus. Large lecture classes may remain online even after campuses open. Traditional aspects of collegiate life — athletic competitions, concerts and yes, parties — may occur, but in much different fashions. Imagine athletics events taking place in empty stadiums, recital halls with patrons spaced rows apart and virtual social activities replacing parties.
“But students will still benefit from all that makes in-person education so valuable: the fierce intellectual debates that just aren’t the same on Zoom, the research opportunities in university laboratories and libraries and the personal interactions among students with different perspectives and life experiences.”
But the paragraphs that might be called tone deaf are these.
“The basic business model for most colleges and universities is simple — tuition comes due twice a year at the beginning of each semester. Most colleges and universities are tuition dependent. Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue.
“This loss, only a part of which might be recouped through online courses, would be catastrophic, especially for the many institutions that were in precarious financial positions before the pandemic. It’s not a question of whether institutions will be forced to permanently close, it’s how many.”
Colleges are too big to fail?
President Paxson of Brown University lays out the beginnings of a plan that hinges on the financial impact to universities as well as welfare of students, their families, faculty, staff, or surrounding communities.
But campus openings don’t depend on Op-ed readers. So why write this and why write it now?
Why write an Op-ed?
I actually don’t have a problem with Paxson’s Op-ed, but that’s because I view it as the opening gambit in a larger negotiation rather than a literal intent to open universities in the fall.
It is possible to get a great education for a fraction of the tuition charged by Brown and other schools and yet applications are up every year. For the last generation or so, universities have been locked in a zero-sum game of fundraising and building endowments. Students (at least those in certain low-earning majors) are saddled with debt that takes decades to pay off. But the death of pricey US universities has been announced for a while now and yet the top ones continue to grow.
Understanding the place that universities play in a much larger system that includes students, academics, staff, community businesses and many more participants, we can come to some early conclusions of COVID-19’s impact on universities:
- Some universities may close for good and some will weather this storm well. The ones that may close are the smaller, poorer, worse schools that also have small alumni networks. That’s not Brown or any of the Ivy league or other elite schools. Universities with large endowments, like Brown, could actually weather an even more extreme coronavirus storm of 100% loss of students and no tuition for the 2020 – 2021 school year. Not that anyone believes it will come to that for elite schools. The schools that are likely to close were going to be in tough shape even without coronavirus.
- Some schools are highly dependent on full-fee tuition from international students. These student numbers are likely to drop, at least for a while. That impacts tuition revenue, services revenue, as well as some of the ability to win grants. As a percentage, international students at Brown are around 17% of the total student population. That’s lower than many other Ivies (Columbia’s international student body is above 30%) and at many other top west coast schools.
- In the worst case scenario that no one entertains where tuition goes to zero for the entire 2020 – 2021 year, Brown would face a 37% loss of revenue (page 13 of their annual report). This is different from the Op-ed’s claim that “[r]emaining closed in the fall (one semester of the school year) means losing as much as half of our revenue,” unless Paxson is talking about a full year closure, all tuition revenue lost, and also the loss of many other university services.
- The report on “Postsecondary Institution Revenues” shows categories of revenue for university type. Tuition, in general makes up only 30% (less than Brown’s 37%) of revenue in the private, non-profit institution type that includes Brown. The revenue category called “All other revenue” (31% for private non-profit colleges) accounts for donations to the schools.
- The Op-ed says nothing about accommodating students who would return to campus alongside those who want to opt for a temporary online experience, along those who want to take a leave of absence until they feel safe to return. Instead, the Op-ed assumes that students will return as normal.
- The Op-ed also says nothing about faculty and staff who may not want to return to their campus in the fall.
- The idea of opening campuses (at least at this point) seems incredibly risky. It seems like a small number of new illnesses or potential deaths would reduce any financial gain to zero pretty quickly.
I would be impressed to see the implementation of ideas outlined in the Op-ed by June — probably the last month to announce campus openings in August.
For these reasons, if we instead look at the Op-ed as the start of a negotiation, it looks more interesting to me.
It asks the question: how are you going to support us so that we don’t need to open our campuses in the fall? Because we may have to open before we’re ready. And that would potentially spread new cases of coronavirus. The system changed, we want to change along with it, but we want help to pay for it.
I’ll also note that the Op-ed is interesting for who did not write it. As one of the smaller Ivies, Brown can submit an Op-ed like this for consideration. If the Op-ed had come from Harvard’s president (who besides being Harvard’s president, also has coronavirus), it might have been dismissed immediately. I believe that Paxson did not surprise the presidents of other elite institutions with her Op-ed and I expect submitted it after consulting with them if she was not elected to be the author.
We’ll see how this plays out in the months ahead. Imagine an unintended consequence that colleges become a new center of infections because they believe they can’t afford to keep their campuses closed. Imagine also that by presenting themselves as needing the tuition dollars, universities in effect force additional government funding to respond to coronavirus readiness.
Until then, keep looking at the systems that emerge in these changing times.