Colleges Are Endangering Students Like Me

Across the country, hundreds of colleges and universities are letting students decide if they want to return to campus this fall. Theoretically, this gives students a range of options and allows them to take their education and health into consideration. In practice, however, there’s an exploitative power dynamic in play, one that puts students in an unfair — and unsafe — position.

Cornell University, where I am a student, laid out its plan in The Wall Street Journal in late June, arguing that reopening campus was safer for us than moving courses online. Relying on survey data taken earlier that month, prior to a wave of Covid-19 breakouts, the president and provost contended in the op-ed that students would return regardless of Cornell’s decision, and that student behavior could not be regulated without an in-person reopening featuring robust testing and social-distancing protocols.

Despite those precautions, returning to campus holds real risk for students. Cornell’s model indicates that hundreds of us will be infected in the rosiest scenario, over 1,000 under expected conditions, and more than 5,000 in the most pessimistic scenario. While Cornell created sweeping safety policies to keep us safe, it would be naïve to expect that all students will follow all these rules all the time.

And for the model’s more optimistic predictions to hold predictive value, preconditions must be implemented effectively. That has not happened. Cornell promised to provide quarantine housing to students arriving from states on the New York travel-advisory list but reversed its decision just before students began arriving. Those students were forced to either remake their travel plans to quarantine elsewhere and arrive later, take on the financial burden of a two-week hotel stay, or even worse, break the state-directed quarantine. Meanwhile, Cornell’s resident advisers have had to threaten a strike to demand the absolute reopening necessities, such as PPE and clear communication about pandemic-related additions to their duties. Colleges across the country are facing similar challenges.

Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle

The reality is that there will be outbreaks even in best-case scenarios. Some students will get sick. Some of them will be hospitalized. And, as recent research tells us, some will have long-term health ramifications as a result of their illness.

That leaves thousands of college students in the difficult position of deciding whether the educational value of returning to campus is worth the health risk. For some, returning home in the spring meant returning to difficult family dynamics that strained their mental health. For others, returning home meant being put at an academic disadvantage due to a lack of computer or internet access. And for many more, myself included, returning home simply ran contrary to everything we hoped to receive from a collegiate experience.

The truth is that we all desperately want to return. And that desperation is part of the problem. When administrators put the option of returning on the table, students will leap at the chance. But as the virus spreads, and as the preconditions that all the elaborate modeling was based on fail to be met, that choice has become profoundly dangerous.

To make matters worse, students lack the necessary information to make good decisions. How can we weigh the options when we don’t even know what our classes will be? Why were we expected to commit ourselves to returning several weeks ago when we only just received our financial-aid packages last week? There is a two-pronged failure at work here. First, administrators have failed to implement the basic public-health measures they promised to students. Second, the lack of information available to students has prevented us from thinking critically about this decision and making a true cost-benefit analysis. We can’t take the administration at its word, yet we also don’t have enough information to make an informed, independent choice.

Colleges are in a difficult position, and I don’t think they are intentionally trying to exploit us. But we have to acknowledge the exploitative potential at play: Colleges are forcing students to decide to return with minimal information. Such a dynamic doesn’t create a real choice for students; it makes them an offer they can’t refuse.

I decided early this summer to return to campus in the fall. I kept wondering whether I was making a mistake, but I felt like I had no choice. With so little information and the fear of being put at a disadvantage without face-to-face interaction with my professors and peers, I had resigned myself to a decision largely made for me. But as I grew increasingly concerned about the infection risk in Ithaca and the prospect of leaving behind my at-risk parents in Florida, I changed course and decided to remain home.

Regardless of the choice each of us makes this fall, colleges have a responsibility to make sure students understand the risks involved in this decision and that they have the space, support, and information to make a real choice. We deserve that.