There’s been an exceptional amount of attention paid to college and university opening the past couple of weeks. Curiously, most of the discussion has focused on the how and when and much less on the why. Although this has come up a bit before, let’s reexamine this as college chaos descends on the nation.

Let’s start with some arguments supporting reopening colleges that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Oftentimes people think of college as an extension of K-12 education, but there are some huge differences. While K-12 also acts as a form of child care, college students are not in need of supervision if left home alone (well, OK, there might be some poor judgement calls, but they should be capable of being home during the day without adult supervision). So one motivation present for K-12 is not present for college students.

How about the quality of education? In terms of what professors can deliver to a class, for many courses there is little quantitative difference. Some colleagues have noted that in some classes, students are actually far more likely to be active participants than if the class was in a classroom. Everybody sees the same stuff; distractions from a student the row ahead playing Doom on a laptop or a student behind telling jokes is absent in virtual space. And in some ways it is easier to break a class into smaller discussion groups in Zoom than in a physical classroom with chairs bolted to the floor. While in K-12 there is little doubt that physical presence in the classroom is a big help, this is far less clear in a college environment: college students are more capable of navigating the tools used in online education and are generally more motivated to make the effort to master material. Now, there certainly are classes that require physical presence (you probably don’t want to mail students a chem lab and have them work with materials that require a hood at home), but those are a small fraction of the courses students would have to take. Is there a hit in overall education? Well, right now with faculty struggling to master these toys, probably some, but it is unlikely to be as great as K-12, and it is probably focused in a small subset of course offerings.

Now there are of course reasons why you wouldn’t reopen colleges; the biggest is obviously personal safety. Even allowing for the lower mortality rate among young adults, that rate is not zero and so letting COVID-19 run free through a college will produce a few deaths. Given how the loss of any college student is often a great trauma for the community, even a couple of deaths would be bad news. Toss in the possibility of infecting faculty and staff or people in the broader community, and it is clear that from a health safety standpoint, reopening colleges is not a good move.

So why reopen at all? There are two kind of interdependent reasons: social growth and financial stability. By “social growth” GG is referring to the kinds of interactions students have outside the classroom, both related to education (e.g., study groups, bull sessions) and socialization (e.g., parties, dating). It has been quite clear that students are not satisfied to just be communicating with peers over the internet. And as far as campus leaders are concerned, it is far less likely that students will be loyal alums to Big State U if BSU is little more than a URL in their browser. Of course, this very aspect of college (one many alums recall fondly) is the one most likely to lead to the spread of coronavirus.

This brings us to financial stability. There are two pieces to this puzzle. The obvious one is tuition money. Virtually all private and increasing numbers of public universities rely on tuition money to pay the bills. Many students and their families have objected to paying full freight for, as they sometimes put it, just another online university. This is of course unfair to the faculty and staff of these schools, who are still working as hard to teach at a high level, but it is understandable. After all, some of that tuition is going to upgrade classrooms and build some buildings and such not; certain to raise hackles are attempts to capture student fees for things like football tickets for games that aren’t happening and access to recreation centers and other amenities that are inaccessible–and yes, some schools have tried to collect such fees. So particularly for schools like CU with a large out-of-state contingent, losing tuition is a potential disaster that might have to be met with elimination of some programs.

The second half is less obvious, but a surprisingly high portion of the overall budget of residential universities is often in housing students. We are, in a sense, a school attached to a resort. Here at CU, all first year students are required to live in campus dorms. It turns out that we have to maintain those dorms even when empty, and pay the bonds used to build or refurbish those dorms. If the students are all home, it is really hard to get parents to pay for these facilities (though again, many schools tried that at one point). So pushing students home is often more financially damaging than just the move to virtual education.

Now campuses have spent a lot of time and money trying to make the academic part of college safe. Classrooms allow social distancing, air handling is changed, schedules altered to permit less crowding in halls, outdoor tents for eating and studying are in place, etc. Far less effort has gone into figuring out how to allow the social side of campus life to proceed more safely. This is the nut that needs to be cracked for this to really work. The armed forces’ academies have decided that testing 15% of faculty, staff and students each week is enough to catch any spike before it happens. Most colleges cannot match that level of testing (let alone the necessary speed of results), so other tacts should be explored. Encouraging students to limit social gatherings to smaller numbers and outside? Providing some kinds of meeting spaces that would be relatively healthy? A lot of the effort in this direction is like the old “Just say no” campaign from the 1980s–don’t do this, don’t do that or bad things will happen. It didn’t go well back then, it won’t go well this time either.

So at the end of the line, we see administrators watching red ink pour out like a scene from The Shining while faculty and surrounding communities see the risk of real blood being shed if campuses are reopened. While some have compared teaching at K-12 as similar frontline service to grocery workers and nurses and doctors, the case isn’t nearly as strong for university faculty and staff to similarly put themselves at risk. Given that the federal government isn’t interested in even covering the massive revenue declines that are crippling state and local governments, the odds of any support to higher ed are very long. And so campus administrators throw the dice and hope they can somehow sneak through enough of a term to collect enough money to get to the other side.

It would be an easier sacrifice to accept were they too in the classrooms with students who were at that big mixer the previous weekend…