This is no small matter. It’s nothing short of a betrayal of students. And it’s one that has no legitimate basis in science or public health.
It’s hard to overstate the harm caused by sending students home to pantomime their college experience behind a laptop screen. These young Americans are being deprived of the social interactions, extracurricular experiences, networking opportunities, and academic resources that make the college years so pivotal.
This can have drastic mental health impacts. An astounding one in four young Americans considered suicide at the height of 2020’s lockdown restrictions, according to the CDC. Similarly, a Harvard survey found that almost half of young adults showed symptoms of depression during that time period. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect similarly tragic implications for students at campuses that shut down again this Spring.
Moreover, the quality of the education they receive will suffer drastically. A May 2021 College Pulse survey found that a majority of students believe they learned less during remote classes than in their previous years. 81 percent said it was difficult to concentrate during online lectures.
The ugly truth is that in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, these students are getting a virtual education that resembles what they could get at a cheap online university or local community college. (In fairness, they’ll still get the fancy name on their degree, which is what many truly care about. That’s probably why not many students dropped out in 2020 despite the “virtual learning” calamity.)
Yale, Duke, and many other private institutions took federal taxpayer money as part of Congress’s COVID-19 relief efforts. Some of this money was specifically intended to help them safely stay open and required them to “implement evidence-based practices to monitor and suppress coronavirus in accordance with public health guidelines.” Instead, once again, they’re opting to shut down—contravening what the evidence would suggest is a more scientific approach.
For while the human consequences of campus shutdowns are very real, what makes them so unconscionable is that all this suffering is for nothing. Far from “following the science,” campus closures ignore it entirely; they’re a form of conformity-signaling that further public health in no meaningful way.
For one thing, college campuses actually have populations that are at a much lower risk from COVID-19 than the general public. Barring rare exceptions such as students with compromised immune systems, healthy college students face a near-zero risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19. Of course, some older people do live or work on campus, like support staff and professors. But the overall population skews much younger than the general population.
Even more importantly, many of these colleges already require almost everyone on campus to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Take Yale and Duke: Both require all students and staff to provide proof of vaccination unless they qualify for a select few exemptions. While vaccinated individuals can still catch the virus, the COVID-19 vaccines have been proven to greatly reduce the risk of death or hospitalization.
In short, these campuses began with populations at minimal risk that are now almost entirely vaccinated, yet they’re shutting down nonetheless.
It’s indefensible. The powers-that-be on these campuses have either been subsumed by irrational fear to the point where they are incorrectly analyzing the risks their communities currently face, or they know that their actions are pointless but are proceeding as a form of political virtue-signaling, to show that they’re not “anti-science” like those rubes who voted for Trump, or something. Either way, we shouldn’t stand for it.
If public universities try to shut down, we should demand that our elected officials intervene and stop them. Private schools certainly have the right to make boneheaded closure decisions if they want, but we don’t have to subsidize their idiocy.
We can and should claw taxpayer money back from campuses that choose to betray students, ignore the science, and close their campuses this Spring.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist, Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education, and co-host of the BASEDPolitics podcast.
The views in this article are the writer’s own.
