Rethinking the cost of higher education
After seeing their classes move online, students at 200 schools are petitioning to get their tuition back, said Douglas Belkin in The Wall Street Journal— and a few are going to court. Many schools “prorated rebates for room and board, but very few—if any—have reimbursed students for tuition.” This week, students at Drexel University and the University of Miami filed suit for refunds. The lawsuits highlight the “widespread discontent” among students who say that online classes are nothing like the education they expected. “Some of the classes are a joke,” says one student at St. John’s University in New York City. “You’re pretty much teaching yourself from a textbook.” The problems are especially acute for students whose classes can’t be taught through internet alone. About 80 visual arts students at Columbia University are now demanding tuition reimbursement, said Margaret Tilley in the school’s student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator. A letter to the university president included six pages detailing the “lost resources,” including the print center, woodshop, desktop computers, and cameras, that their education relies upon. Seniors were told they could “apply for $250 in funding to purchase materials.”
“The pandemic is likely to act as a catalyst for a historic reckoning” in American higher education, said Stephen Mihm in Bloomberg.com. Colleges have long been in an arms race, building new facilities to attract students and then raising prices to pay for the buildings and perks. Now many are “more dependent on tuition dollars for their annual operating budgets” than ever before. So will students and their parents continue to “shell out $50,000 a year” if August rolls around and colleges haven’t reopened? Zoom classes “are worth something, sure, but they’re not worth paying anything close to full freight.” At that point, many students will hold off on enrolling at pricey residential colleges, leaving “the hundreds of schools who have bet their futures on residential education in a serious bind.”
The moment colleges shifted classes online they “surfaced big questions about their core business model,” said Richard Arum and Mitchell Stevens in The New York Times. For many years, colleges—and especially elite ones—resisted online classes, insisting that the “sage on the stage” running a lecture or seminar was the only way to provide the benefits of higher education. Now universities want to assign the same credits—and bill as much—for the online classes as they do for “face-to-face delivery.” Students are getting the worst of all worlds: They’re not getting residential-college life, and they “are finishing their coursework in video chat rooms.” Higher education costs twice as much per student in the U.S. as it does in Europe. This pandemic could finally be the impetus for American universities to invest enough in online learning to change that.