Losses felt by students may spread to all
You hear a lot of wouldhave-been conversations these days, as in, “I would have been doing (fill in the blank) if it weren’t for the coronavirus.” If you dwell on it, you might feel sorry for yourself.
Like, this weekend was supposed to be alumni weekend at one of my schools, and my old friends and I — dispersed all over the country, but remembering all we shared so long ago — are mighty disappointed that our big class reunion was canceled. But, of course, the young people who are now barred from their campuses by the threat of illness are missing more. I’m sad for them.
I got a vivid sense of just what the students have lost when email this week surfaced a recording from the college where I spent my undergraduate years, a fine small university in Texas. It was made by melding dozens of voice tracks of individual student musicians, each singing alone in their homes, into a single virtual chorus.
“Fall on me like silent dew... melt my pain with thy soft strains,” the young people sang, their voices rising from their isolation, blending as though they were shoulder to shoulder, breathing as one. My eyes were wet, not just because of the beauty of their performance, I realized, but for their loss. Making music can be a deep emotional and spiritual experience. As I listened, I became once again a college musician, imagining cherished friends to my left and right. In an instant, I was struck by what today’s students were forfeiting by being unable to share what for many will have been the last such intimate moment of music-making of their college years. Certainly the pandemic has imposed greater pain on millions of people. Some have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or found their careers upended, or been left struggling to find money for food and rent. Around the world, the impact of the coronavirus will be felt for years to come, in homelessness, hunger and political upheaval.
But it is not inconsequential when someone at the cusp of adulthood loses experiences and opportunities that would culminate years of preparation, or that serve as emotional and ceremonial markers of an important passage. Sports championship games and graduation ceremonies have been canceled, semesters abroad called off, research projects abandoned. Some friends will never see each other again, though they likely don’t realize it now.
What this year’s college students are missing, though, may foreshadow a change that will linger for years. American higher education was at a crossroads before COVID-19 shuttered dormitories and foreshortened academic years. Now it seems increasingly likely that college will never be the same.
About seven in 10 young Americans enroll in college right after graduating from high school, for both pragmatic and less tangible reasons. Graduates earn far more over a lifetime than people who don’t go to college, even accounting for the high cost of that education, but the college experience is valued as much for the experience it gives young people as for its financial reward.
Yet many public and private schools were in peril before the coronavirus forced campus closures and refunds. The Wall
What this year’s college students are missing may foreshadow a change that will linger for years. American higher education was at a crossroads before COVID-19; now it is on the brink of a crisis.
Street Journal noted this week that almost one-third of U.S. colleges were operating at a deficit before the virus hit. Now they are on the brink of crisis.
Partly, this is because the number of traditional collegeage students is dropping, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. That’s one factor that has led schools to compete by building expensive academic and athletic facilities and offering big aid packages (few families pay the full price of their kids’ education). States have slashed taxpayer support for public universities, which have responded by trying to lure students from private schools — many of which were founded in the 19th century by churches, which no longer offer much financial support.
Now, facing added coronavirus-caused burdens and uncertainty, many schools are responding with sharp budget cuts, layoffs and furloughs — including, in the Capital Region, Union College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the College of Saint Rose. Their fragility is shared by colleges all over the country. One expert told the Journal that he expects one-fifth of the nation’s 1,000 private liberal arts colleges to close in the next year.
It’s hard to overstate the harm if that were to happen — if any of these institutions cease to be a vigorous presence in our communities. Yet the vision of abandoned campuses is hard to shake. Beyond the pain of a single year of students’ lost experiences, then, we all would be left to think of what would have been, and what once was, and we’d rightly feel quite sorry for ourselves.