Is 2022 the year when young people should postpone college?

 "Nobody thinks of anything as long as his luck is good," Kurt Vonnegut observed in one of his novels.  "Why should he?"

American colleges have had a remarkable run of good luck. For half a century, they've enjoyed a steady supply of students and a cornucopia of federal money flowing into their coffers. International students flocked to American universities in ever larger numbers, and they obligingly paid their tuition bills with no complaints about the cost.

Salaries for university presidents rose ever upward, and administrative staffs became more and more bloated with overpaid administrators--vice presidents and associate vice presidents, deans and associate deans, provosts, and executive vice provosts.  

Universities launched aggressive building programs: luxury dorms, ostentatious athletic facilities, world-class student recreation centers.  Wealthy alumni made fat contributions to have their names on all these gleaming edifices.

Tuition went up every year to pay for all this, but students paid their bills with federal and private student loans, and no one complained. 

Those were the gravy days!  

Then, in March 2020, the black swan arrived. COVID swept across the country, forcing universities to close their campuses. College leaders shuttered all those glittering student rec centers, emptied out the posh student dorms, and canceled college sporting events. 

Still, no worries. The coronavirus pandemic wouldn't last forever. How could it? In a year or so, the crisis would be over, and everything would be back to normal in the halcyon world of academe.

In fact, University leaders patted themselves on the back for responding to the pandemic so nimbly. In a matter of days, virtually every college in America had kicked their students off-campus and forced them to finish the spring semester by taking courses on their home computers. 

But students weren't happy about taking classes online, and they filed hundreds of lawsuits, demanding refunds for their tuition and fees. More than 300 lawsuits were filed.

And the COVID virus did not go away. In fact, many American schools are starting the 2022 spring semester with online classes--even such snooty joints as Harvard. Stanford and Georgetown.

Now student enrollments are declining--especially in the for-profit sector, the community colleges, and the non-elite private schools. For reasons that college presidents can't seem to understand, students don't want to pay $70,000 a year to attend online classes from the parents' basements.

In addition, universities across the country have been mired in scandals and litigation: sexual misconduct by varsity athletes, bribery in the admissions offices, and accusations of race discrimination.

In sum, American higher education's run of good luck has run dry.

So, if you are a young person, is 2022 a good year to postpone going to college? A good year to let things settle down?

I think it is. Unless you clearly understand how your college education will improve your life, don't take out crushing student loans to pay tuition at a college that won't let you on its campus.

Just leave your tuition check on the doorstep.

Online teaching sucks: Don't pay $50,000 a year to take classes in your pajamas

 American universities are in a tight spot. When the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, almost all of them closed their campuses and switched to online instruction.

Result? Students filed hundreds of lawsuits against the colleges, claiming--rightly in my opinion--that online teaching is inferior to face-to-face instruction and wasn't what they paid for. In many of these cases, students were paying tuition priced north of $25,000 a semester, yet they could not personally interact with a single professor.

Now, as the 2021 fall semester approaches, colleges must decide what to do.  Basically, they have three choices:

First, they can continue with online instruction, hoping that students will consent to another year of taking courses on their home computers.

Second, colleges can reopen their campuses but require students to wear masks and maintain social distancing. But such a policy imposes onerous burdens on students, which many of them probably won't accept.

Third, colleges and universities can reopen their campuses for face-to-face learning while insisting that all students get the COVID vaccine.

In my opinion, most colleges have no real choice--they've got to get professors and students back in the classroom under more or less normal conditions, and they've got to require everyone in the campus community--students, instructors, and staff-- to get vaccinated. 

If colleges continue teaching in an online format, they will experience significant losses in enrollment.  Why? Because online learning sucks, and everyone knows it.

 A recent report by the Brookings Institution confirmed what everybody already knew: "Online coursework generally yields worse student performance than in-person course work." Moreover, the Brookings researchers reported, "The negative effects of online course-taking are particularly pronounced for less academically prepared students and for students pursuing bachelor's degrees."

College bureaucrats may worry about getting sued if they make professors and students get vaccinated.  But the Seventh Circuit, in a decision issued in early August, ruled that Indiana University can require its students to be vaccinated as a condition of enrollment.

So--the bottom line is this--universities have the legal authority to require students to get vaccinated against COVID and refuse admission to students who won't get their shots.

And that's what they had better do. Because students and their parents won't put up with another year of online instruction that costs 25 grand a semester.

College professors: They're alive! They're alive!

References

Klaassen v. Trs. of Indiana Univ., No. 21-2326, 2021 WL 3281209 (7th Cir. Aug. 2. 2021).