Young people will pay the price as post-secondary education goes online

For all our worries about venerable seniors in lifethreatening situations, spare a thought for vulnerable students just starting their adult lives in the era of COVID-19.

Ross Romano has. But the minister of colleges and universities insists he remains optimistic in mid-pandemic.

“You’re absolutely right — definitely there’s going to be a hit, no one’s going to come away without that,” Romano tells me.

But with campuses in a panic, losing students and bleeding revenues, he warns the government can’t work miracles: “There isn’t that magic wand. We won’t be able to cover everyone’s losses.”

At best, in the worst of times, he can “put pressure on the wound,” and hope post-secondary education emerges stronger when it recovers and rebuilds.

While the rest of the economy is reopening day by day, or planning its comeback week by week, campuses across Ontario face a more daunting challenge: September classes are still four months away, yet students want to know within days whether they will see teachers online only, or in labs and lecture halls.

With June deadlines looming for university acceptances and tuition deposits, more than 80,000 incoming students must decide soon. Facing an unpredictable pandemic with unknowable parameters, they want precise answers to their questions in a world without certainty.

If classes resume, how to stay safe from classmates? If residences reopen, how keep apart from roommates? If cafeterias restart, how to contain contamination, when lining up with fellow students could pose a bigger peril than food poisoning?

The answers to those questions will trigger yet more questions:

If classes shift to long-distance learning, what’s a fair short-term tuition discount for a virtual experience? If athletic facilities are closed and extracurricular activities cancelled, will student fees be reimbursed? (Universities are still smarting after being blindsided by a government-imposed tuition cut of 10 per cent last year, and the dismantling of mandatory fees.)

Will international students keep coming? What if they can’t find flights, or secure student visas — or get their money’s worth? Will they still pay far higher foreign tuition fees to learn from far away? If they stay away, how will colleges and universities that depend heavily on foreign revenues make up massive shortfalls?

This week, McGill University and UBC announced classes will be held online this fall. Ontario campuses have so far hedged their bets, keen to avoid deterring students or revealing just how fragile their finances may be. Universities and colleges are closed until further notice. And they are caught in a costly limbo that is leaving students adrift.

Amid the contingency planning, the most likely Ontario scenario is a hybrid academic year. Courses would begin online in September, with some variations; while large first-year classes are confined to the web, smaller classes could eventually take over their spaces vacated in auditoriums or large classrooms.

But there are bigger existential questions in the ivory tower. If universities resort to bigger bandwidth online, how do they provide buzz and connectivity for students who rely on networking on campus for their future careers?

Basic academic values — the value proposition, in today’s parlance — include a university experience that is transformational, not transactional. It is the sum of informal campus encounters, not merely the formal credentials embedded in a diploma.

Online learning may well be the future, but today’s tuition is based on a rigid cost structure built of bricks and mortar, erected on a foundation of tenured professors and fancy gyms. Students don’t need a PhD in economics to understand price points, and may yet rebel over a bait and switch approach to in-class versus online learning.

Another consideration is that most of the province’s students emanate from Toronto, and with so much uncertainty in the air, many may opt to stay closer to home — hunkering down with their parents in a pandemic rather than risking languishing online, on campus, out of town and under quarantine. In fact, with fewer foreign students competing for spots, Toronto schools may offer more admissions to local students, cannibalizing the student bodies of other regional colleges and universities — creating a domino effect across the province.

As minister, Romano says he is consulting university and college presidents frequently to take stock of the situation. He has distributed $25 million in emergency funding (left over from the last fiscal year), and secured $144 million for long-term infrastructure spending, but that won’t go far given the latest — and looming — campus setbacks.

Recognizing the reality, Romano has agreed to suspend an ambitious plan to tie post-secondary funding to performance based on comprehensive — and controversial — metrics. But he wants colleges and universities to adapt, and is adamant that online degrees gain an equal footing.

He is also optimistic that international students will choose Ontario if it is proven safe: “International students, I really do think that they will continue to come, in fact I feel that there’s going to be an increase.” As for domestic students, “coming out of COVID19, I think we’re going to see a large uptick of people who want to retrain and retool,” he says in our interview.

We’ll see this September, and the September after that. But we’ll find out long before then how colleges and universities colleges plan to survive the pandemic — and what students make of it.

The only certainty is that as post-secondary education goes online — and off campus — young people will pay a price.