Some colleges must reopen by the fall or die

The former Southern Vermont College, in Bennington, closed last year. It’s one of several small New England colleges put out of business by changing student demographics. COVID-19 is likely to kill more of them in the coming months.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Kudos to Brown University and some other schools that are making  dorm rooms available to house front-line workers in the pandemic emergency. With large parts of these institutions effectively closed, they have plenty of space to offer.

But what happens next September? Many colleges and universities are now agonizing over whether COVID-19 will let them safely physically reopen. If not, how many students and their parents will be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars  to take classes via the likes of Zoom? The  claims that online learning is almost as good as in-person classes are laughable.   Zoom, Skype, et al., are technically impressive but frankly as a teaching vehicle they suck (to coin a phrase) compared to in-person instruction.

So I’d guess that many students will decide to take a “gap year,” with the idea of entering, or returning to, college in the fall of 2021. The trouble is that there won’t be many jobs available for them in the interim and that some of their colleges will die as the pandemic dries up their tuition and fees revenue.

It’s not clear how Trump’s latest immigration/foreign visitor orders might affect, at least indirectly,  many foreign students at American colleges and universities, most paying full freight. The American Council on Education says that more than 1 million foreign students attend U.S. colleges and universities, contributing more than $39 billion to the economy and subsidizing American students.

In any case, a lot of these colleges must physically reopen by the fall or die.