When Coronavirus Closes Colleges, Some Students Lose Hot Meals, Health Care, and a Place to Sleep

When Berea College sent out a campuswide email at midday on Tuesday, announcing that it would end in-person instruction and send students home for the rest of the semester because of concerns about the coronavirus, the dining hall erupted in cheers.

But quickly the students turned solemn, worried, even a little panicky, said Brady Willis, a sophomore from Northern California. Willis’s roommate tried to figure out if he had enough gas money to drive from the Kentucky college back home to Georgia. A group of students began to pool money to rent a storage locker, $20 here, $25 there. Another wondered where he’d find a job to help his family pay for the extra two months of groceries they’d have to buy when he returned home.

“It’s been a roller coaster of emotions,” said Willis, the student-body vice president, late Tuesday night.

Berea, nestled in the rolling Appalachian Mountains, has a unique mission: to serve economically disadvantaged students. Nearly all of its 1,600 students receive Pell Grants; the average family income is less than $30,000 a year.

But as colleges across the country cancel in-person classes and tell students to leave campus, the challenges facing Willis and his classmates are not unusual. For many low-income and first-generation students, college is not just an educational institution but their primary source of security, a provider of hot meals and health care and a place to sleep.

The abrupt college closures — many institutions have told undergraduates to leave by the end of this week — have been jarring for all students, but they can be particularly distressing for the most disadvantaged. Those students may lack the funds to get home, or not have a home to go to. They may not have reliable internet connections with which to continue classes online. Their work-study job pays all the bills.

Advocates for such students worry that their needs have not been front and center as colleges made their coronavirus-contingency plans. “In situations like this, you’re only as good as what you’re doing for your most vulnerable people,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University and founder of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice.

Such students are numerous, Goldrick-Rab said. Half of all students at community colleges and as many as one-third of those at four-year institutions suffer food or housing insecurities.

When she saw the campus-closure announcements snowballing on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon, Goldrick-Rab drafted a list of tips for colleges about how to respond to Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, while aiding low-income students. Among her suggestions: Keep your food pantry open (with proper safety precautions in place). Let uninsured students know how Medicaid can pay for emergency screenings and treatment. Offer loaner laptops and portable Wi-Fi hotspots so that students can get online.

It’s not just financially needy students who may be hurt by the closures, said Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University and author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Some students may have no relationship with their parents or may come from homes made unsafe by abuse. Others may have grown up in foster care and have now aged out. International students, of course, may find it impossible to go home because of health and safety concerns, travel bans, or visa restrictions.

Who Has a Credit Card?

Andrew Pérez, a Harvard senior, counts himself lucky in that, unlike many of his classmates, he has money saved and can afford to fly home to Los Angeles when student housing closes, on Sunday. Others have been scrambling. Even if the university reimburses their travel tickets, many don’t have the funds to cover the upfront costs or a credit card to book tickets. (Harvard said on Wednesday that it would help students with booking and that every student would be able to travel home “safely and affordably.” It will also give every student $200 toward storage or shipping costs.)

Coronavirus Hits Campus

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.

• Here’s Our List of Colleges’ Reopening Models
• Why Is Gettysburg College Giving Up on ‘The Gettysburg Review’?
• Fall-Enrollment Trends in Distance Education: a Snapshot

But travel costs are just the tip of the iceberg, and Pérez said the university had offered little guidance specifically for low-income students. With so much uncertainty, he and other members of Primus, Harvard’s organization for first-generation and low-income students, sprang into action, drawing up a list of resources for students to consult. They also turned to Harvard’s first-generation and low-income alumni group, which created a spreadsheet where graduates and faculty members could offer to help.

In little more than 15 hours some 450 people had signed on, said Paul Martin, a 1994 graduate and the group’s vice president. They volunteered to store students’ belongings and help them move. Some offered to provide temporary places to stay.

They also are organizing a fund drive to help cover unexpected costs, and Martin said they hoped to create a job board for the students.

The community support has been heartening, but Pérez said he couldn’t help but feel a little frustrated with his university. “It’s very much a class issue, and I think Harvard isn’t recognizing it enough,” he said.

Harvard has yet to decide whether it will hold commencement, but students have been told to expect not to return to campus this spring. Pérez said that isn’t how he imagined his time at Harvard would end. “It hit that my parents are not going to get to see me walk,” he said. He will be the first college graduate in his family.

Goldrick-Rab also suggests that colleges take the time to assess who can go home, who can make alternate arrangements, who absolutely needs to stay on campus. “This is a public-health crisis,” she said. “It isn’t a fire.”

As soon as Amherst College announced it was shifting to online classes after next week’s spring break, Kyle Nguyen, a junior from Orange County, Calif., petitioned to stay on campus. The Massachusetts college has said it will consider a limited number of requests, from students who are unable to go home or find other lodging.

Because flying home to the West Coast is so expensive, Nguyen already planned to spend spring break on campus. But he also worries that going home would strain the finances of his parents, who have three younger children. At Amherst, where he is on a full scholarship, his meals and housing are covered. “If I go home,” he said, “that’s something my parents have to pay money for.”

If he had to live in a three-room house with six other people, Nguyen, who is studying biochemistry and music, wonders how he’d get any work done. “Academically, it just wouldn’t work well,” he said.

Amherst and Harvard are among a number of colleges that have announced they will prorate room and board charges for students who do return home, although the refunds may be less important to students like Nguyen than to middle-income students and families, who are more likely to have paid those costs out of pocket.

‘I Want to Try to Keep the Doors Open’

As of Wednesday afternoon more than 100 colleges had announced plans to turn to online classes, but some institutions were resisting. Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, said it would be difficult for her students, a majority of whom are low-income women, to use distance education. While most Trinity students have smartphones, that’s often their only electronic device, and their D.C.-area neighborhoods frequently lack broadband access.

Canceling in-person classes would disrupt her students’ education, said McGuire, a regular contributor to The Chronicle Review. “I’m not judging others, but I want to try to keep the doors open.”

Recognizing that not all students have reliable internet access is why Berea opted to not continue its classes online, said Timothy W. Jordan, a college spokesman. Professors were asked to wrap up instruction for the semester by Friday, although individual faculty members could plan assignments to be completed later. “We didn’t want to risk putting students at a disadvantage,” Jordan said.

The college will also continue to pay students — all Berea students are required to work — for their campus jobs through the end of the semester because for some, it’s a critical source of income, Jordan said.

Jack, the author and Harvard professor, said the coronavirus outbreak underscored socioeconomic divides that are always present in higher education. “The closures are highlighting the vulnerabilities,” he said. “The reality is, not every student on campus has an exit strategy. So what do we do for those who don’t?”