When university presidents are asked whether they’ll open their campuses for the fall 2020 semester, most couch their answers in conditionals and assumptions. By now they’ve realized that they can’t just open for business on September 1 and let everyone rush back onto campus like excited Black Friday shoppers. Ohio State President Michael Drake suggested he might start bringing professors back to campus in a few weeks. Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, said he would reopen its campus in the fall and separate those older than 35 from those younger. But even he called the declaration “preliminary.”

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When there are tens of thousands of dollars at stake for students and their families, I don’t know is not a satisfying answer. Why would students plunge themselves into years of debt for an online education instead of the full college experience they signed up for? Some soon-to-be high-school graduates have proposed taking a gap year, but for a lot of students—low-income students, minority students, adult students—that is not a practical option.

If students are able to walk onto campuses in the fall, they might not recognize the universities they’ve enrolled in. Arenas and auditoriums may be converted into lecture halls, which would allow students to avoid cramped classrooms and spread out. Hotels could become dormitories so that students can have their own rooms and bathrooms with limited exposure to germs. Then there’s the question of sports—specifically, the multimillion-dollar college-football industry. “Talking to some of my colleagues who run big-time Division I programs, they’re really sweating this out, because those television revenues are big dollars,” LeBlanc, who also chairs the board of the American Council on Education, the nation’s largest higher-education coordinating body, told me. Clemson’s head football coach, Dabo Swinney, has been adamant that the school will be playing games in the fall. But even in that unlikely scenario, teams would likely play to empty stadiums.

Walter Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University, in New Orleans, told me he plans to use the chapel on campus that was renovated after Katrina—and can now accommodate 800 people—for large lecture courses where students can remain socially distant. That might be easy for smaller colleges like Dillard, whose “large” classes are about 50 people, but at state flagship universities, it’s unrealistic. Kimbrough also told me his plan is tentative; if returning to campus is too risky, the university will continue to operate online.

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Many colleges are building out their online infrastructure with incomplete data. College leaders are leaning on research about the best practices for online learning to guide their strategies, but that research does not account for the multilayered disruption of a pandemic. College-from-home becomes a radically different undertaking when students have been laid off from jobs and are now home trying to figure out child care. (Nearly one in four undergraduate students has children.)