Ahead of the coming reopening of further education, universities and colleges around America are beginning to announce massive layoffs and job cuts, citing financial difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Public and private university systems announcing cuts to staff, pay and benefits include the University of Massachusetts, California State University, Boston University, University of Arizona and many others.
Raven Liu always thought that she had a chance, however slim it was, to travel from Beijing to the University of Southern California to attend her first semester in person, even during a pandemic.
“It’s meaningless to learn online because I study film production,” the newly enrolled graduate student said. “I can’t collaborate with my teammates for shooting, and my first year of production courses can be wasted.”
Tuition payments at Texas A&M University come due in just 10 days. But rising junior Hayley Jarjoura — and more than 8,000 of her fellow Aggies — don’t think they should have to pay the full rate for online classes and reduced access to campus services.
In early July, Jarjoura and her friends organized a petition after Jarjoura saw student concerns about costs popping up on Twitter. It’s one of many petitions that have circulated online over the summer, calling for tuition and fees reductions from universities.
The last time the University of Mississippi campus was full of students was in May. They had come to clear out their dorms, after the coronavirus had chased them home in March.
"It was hard because everyone … was finally getting together, bonding, getting really close, like all my friends, and then we all had to leave," said Olivia Fuller, who spent most of the spring semester taking classes online at home in Chicago.
As colleges struggle to retain students in the wake of the pandemic, several institutions are offering tuition-free semesters for students who will enroll in the upcoming academic year.
Beloit College, a private liberal arts college in Wisconsin, announced ahead of the new academic year where classes officially begin on September 1, that it will offer a tuition-free ninth and 10th semester to students who enroll full-time in the 2020-2021 school year.
Tuition bills are coming due, and while millions of students across the country are weighing the risks of going back to college in the middle of a pandemic, the most financially strapped students carry an added burden of dwindling aid.
American Higher Education Alliance and the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration have announced a partnership which will allow their members to virtually collaborate on “co-development and programmatic internationalisation”.
While the Covid-19 pandemic has in many respects been an unmitigated disaster for American higher education, there has been one small silver lining: when unemployment rises during recessionary times, usually that increases college enrollments. Recently unemployed workers reason they should use newly idle time to improve their academic credentials, making themselves more marketable in the future. In economics lingo, the opportunity cost of going to college falls, since there is no longer a big loss of income associated with it.
Students, classrooms and instructors have persisted as key components of the U.S. higher education system since its first colleges opened in the 17th century. Despite major societal changes in the past four hundred years, the vast majority of postsecondary students began 2020 in traditional classrooms. Just three months later almost every institution of higher education (IHE) was forced to shift the delivery method of their instruction—some in less than a week—with varying degrees of success and failure.
Dozens of colleges and universities nationwide started 2020 already under financial stress. They’d spent the past decade grappling with declining enrollments and weakening support from state governments.
Now, with the added pressures of the coronavirus pandemic, the fabric of American higher education has become even more strained: The prospect of lower revenues has already forced some schools to slash budgets and could lead to waves of closings, experts and researchers say.