Last year, 427 students and 116 faculty and staff members, musicians, and interns from 38 states and 28 countries participated in the American Dance Festival at Duke University. Twenty-four dance companies and choreographers presented 66 performances.
This year, the studios will be empty, the stages dark, as the storied summer festival, which dates to the 1930s, joins hundreds of other college summer programs canceled, or in some cases moved online, by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even with the online alternatives, the lost summer will cost colleges hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, industry experts say, before what’s shaping up to be an even more financially devastating fall.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
<p>Most colleges run or host summer programs to supplement their budgets. The off-season revenue can account for up to 10 percent of annual income, said William G. Tierney, a professor emeritus of higher education at the University of Southern California. That money is all the more crucial in light of major budget shocks, drastic cuts in state support, battered endowment values, and a shaky fall-enrollment outlook from the pandemic and the recession it has all but certainly triggered. Add to that additional losses from canceled summer programs abroad.
Beyond the financial loss, Tierney said, many of these academic, athletic, and artistic programs serve to introduce precollege teens — often low-income and underrepresented minorities — to the college environment. Some summer programs help ready them scholastically, improving STEM and reading skills, and imbue them with “a sense of belonging.”
“That’s not going to happen this summer,” he said, and that gap might further erode not just fall enrollment this year but retention and completion down the line. A number of colleges, having turned on a dime to move spring offerings online, are likewise doing their utmost to quickly create or ramp up online courses for the summer. As impressive as those efforts are, even at their best, the online options are “a poor second,” Tierney said.
Pandemic Will Leave Parents Risk-Averse
No organization tracks all colleges’ summer programs, but the trends are clear. Officially, some colleges have so far announced only the cancellation of early-summer sessions, beginning in mid- to late May, and are still weighing, until late April, whether sessions starting in early July might still occur.
But Tierney and others assume those will be canceled too. They said that even if self-quarantine orders were lifted and sufficient travel options revived in time for families to make arrangements, many parents wouldn’t be psychologically prepared to risk sending their kids onto airplanes and into dormitories and other group settings. Add to that obstacle the sudden financial strain on many families from lost jobs and salary cuts.
While some academic programs can shift relatively smoothly to online, arts and sports camps don’t. The Bates Dance Festival, run by that college, has canceled what would have been its 38th season, serving 300 students and employing 100 faculty members and performers, said its director, Shoshona Currier. The American Camp Association, which accredits 62 athletic, computer-coding, STEM, and other camps at colleges and universities, said that as of this week it knows of two that are opting for online alternatives. The rest are still deciding whether, and how, to move forward.
The American Dance Festival has lost not just the fruits of nine months’ preparation, said Jodee Nimerichter, its executive director, but also up to $800,000 in funding, a serious blow to a program with a $3.5-million annual budget. And, said Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, the festival is only one of many sports, STEM, environmental, creative-writing, gifted-and-talented, and other programs that normally bring some 20,000 students to the campus each summer.
“Summer is a multimillion-dollar business for Duke,” Schoenfeld said. Many of the university-run first-session programs are moving online, he said, and administrators are still gauging the outlook for the second session.
Many institutions, like West Virginia University, have canceled all in-person classes through the summer while planning to expand online options. The summer program on that campus last year enrolled 10,750 students, brought in 9.5 percent of the university’s revenue, and involved 2,200 faculty members and 3,500 staff members. The university canceled its many sports camps through June and said it would have updates on later sports sessions.
Summer sessions at Middlebury College account for 7 percent of its annual revenue, said Jeffrey Cason, provost and executive vice president. More than 2,000 students take its 12 language-program courses; enroll in the Bread Loaf School of English, which operates in Vermont, New Mexico, and Oxford, England; participate in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; or attend the School of the Environment, in China.
The China program has been canceled, but Cason said Middlebury was still exploring its options for the others, taking into consideration local health ordinances and travel for both students and international faculty members. The college is considering online alternatives. “We do think we can move significant parts of what we do to remote instruction,” he said, “and are currently discussing what this might look like.”
Seizing the Opportunity
Other institutions too are trying to turn a disaster into an opportunity to increase their summer online footprint. Last summer Fairfield University enrolled 595 students in 47 undergraduate online courses. This summer it is expanding that to 100 undergraduate online courses.
Stanford University hasn’t previously offered online versions of its Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes, Summer Humanities Institute, and Mathematics Camp. But the Stanford Online High School, which is under the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies umbrella, has for 14 years. So online summer institutes are being developed in partnership with that. The residential summer program normally offers about 80 courses over two three-week sessions. This summer the university plans to offer about 60 online courses over three two-week sessions, with some courses repeating.
The University of New Haven will offer 400 summer classes online. The number of teaching staff members will be roughly equivalent to that for its in-person classes in the past. The university expected about $7 million, or 3.1 percent of annual tuition and general fees, from this summer and is now “anticipating a significant loss.”
Many programs, even if they are able to move online, won’t be nearly as robust as what they are replacing. Even where teaching positions are largely maintained, a number of facilities, tech, and food-service employees will lose summer work. And even a well-designed summer term isn’t the same as being there, hanging out with like-minded students, playing Frisbee, chowing down in the dining hall.
“You can still build community online,” says Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges & Universities and a former president of Mount Holyoke College, “but it won’t serve the same purpose, to give students the experience of what it’s like to be on campus.”
