As colleges move online, families rebel against cost

After Southern California’s soaring coronavirus caseload forced Chapman University this month to abruptly abandon plans to reopen its campus and shift to an autumn of all-remote instruction, the school promised that students would still get a ‘‘robust Chapman experience.’’

‘What about a robust refund?’’ Christopher Moore, a spring graduate, retorted on Facebook.

A parent chimed in.

‘‘We are paying a lot of money for tuition, and our students are not getting what we paid for,’’ wrote Shannon Carducci, whose youngest child, Ally, is a sophomore at Chapman, in Orange County, where the cost of attendance averages $65,000 a year.

Back when they believed that Ally would be attending classes in person, her parents leased her a $1,200-amonth apartment. Now, Carducci said, she plans to ask for a tuition discount.

A rebellion against the high cost of a bachelor’s degree, already brewing around the nation before the coronavirus, has gathered fresh momentum as campuses have strained to operate in the pandemic. Incensed at paying face-to-face prices for education that is increasingly online, students and their parents are demanding tuition rebates, increased financial aid, reduced fees and leaves of absences to compensate for what they feel will be a diminished college experience.

At Rutgers University, more than 30,000 people have signed a petition started in July calling for an elimination of fees and a 20% tuition cut. More than 40,000 have signed a plea for the University of North Carolina system to refund housing charges to students in the event of another Covid-19-related campus shutdown. The California State University system’s early decision to go online-only this fall has incited calls for price cuts at campuses from Fullerton to San Jose.

At Ithaca College — student population, 5,500 — the financial services team reports more than 2,000 queries in the past month about financial aid and tuition adjustments. Some 340 Harvard University freshmen — roughly a fifth of the first-year class — deferred admission rather than spend part of the year online, and a parents’ lobbying group, formed on Facebook last month, has asked the administration to reduce tuition and relax rules for leaves of absence.

Universities have been divided in their response, with some offering discounts but most resisting, arguing that remote learning and other virus measures are making their operations more, not less, costly at a time when higher education is already struggling.

‘‘These are unprecedented times, and more and more families are needing more and more financial assistance to enroll in college,’’ said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president for the American Council on Education, a higher education trade group. ‘‘But colleges also need to survive.’’

The roster of colleges that have rescinded plans to reopen their classrooms has been growing by the day. In the past two weeks, the universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Southern California and Virginia, Princeton University and a host of other colleges announced plans to hold all or most of their classes online, citing concerns about the coronavirus. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, less than a quarter of the nation’s 5,000 colleges are committed to providing instruction primarily or completely in person.

Chapman’s president, Daniele Struppa, said the university spent $20 million on technology and public health retrofits for the fall semester, and he estimates that the switch to an online fall will cost the school $110 million in revenue. He has cut spending ‘‘brutally’’ from the $400 million annual budget, he said, freezing hires, slashing expenses, canceling construction of a new gym, ending the retirement match to employees and giving up 20% of his own $720,000 base salary.

Only students who can demonstrate financial need will get help, he has told families.

‘‘Tuition really reflects our cost of operation, and that cost has not only not diminished but has greatly increased,’’ Struppa said.

A survey by the American Council on Education estimated that reopening this fall would add 10% to a college’s regular operating expenses, costing the country’s 5,000 some colleges and universities a total of $70 billion.

Students are feeling tempest tossed, too.

Temple University sociologist Sara Goldrick-rab, founder of the school’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice, said the organization has been ‘‘bombarded’’ with pleas for help from students who can’t cover their rent and don’t know how to apply for food stamps. At least a third of students had lost jobs because of the pandemic by May, according to the center.

Laurie Koehler, vice president for enrollment strategy at Ithaca College, said about 1 in 6 students reported in a just-completed survey that the pandemic had significantly hurt their ability to continue their studies. At Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, the school’s president, Alison Byerly, said she expects requests for additional financial aid to grow by up to 15% this year.

But the shift online also has accelerated fundamental questions about the future of higher education, said the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, Marguerite Roza.

‘‘This is a moment,’’ said Roza, ‘‘that is basically forcing students and parents to say, ‘What is the value? If I can’t set foot on campus, is that the same value?’ ’’

A handful of universities have announced substantial price cuts. Franciscan University of Steubenville, a private Catholic university in Ohio with about 3,000 students, announced in April that it will cover 100% of tuition costs, after financial aid and scholarships, for incoming undergraduates.

More typical is the 10% cut at Catholic University in Washington, which plans to start the semester online and dramatically scale back the number of students allowed back onto campus.

But most colleges have kept prices flat, and a few have even increased them. They can’t afford to do otherwise without mass faculty layoffs, said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education, even though the isolated, monitored experience campuses are selling this fall ‘‘is going to feel like some combination of a monastery and a minimumsecurity prison.’’