Universities benefiting from college football must support students

Why are we doing this?

The past few days have brought news from various corners of the academic world. Harvard announced that it would not provide on-campus instruction for undergraduate students in the upcoming academic year, but that its tuition — nearly $50,000 — would remain in place despite the inability to provide the full menu of services associated with an on-campus, in-person educational experience.

I didn’t notice an announcement from Sunday at Washington State University until someone retweeted it into my Twitter timeline Monday night:

This generated a lot of responses from Twitter followers who are either dealing with this kind of situation directly, or know a family who is, at other schools across the country:

I don’t have kids, but if I did, there’s no way on God’s green Earth I would pay full-price tuition for a significantly reduced online-only educational experience. If I had a son or daughter who insisted on having an education from an outside institution — as opposed to doing personal study or taking a year off, or doing something enterprising in the midst of this pandemic, until a vaccine emerges — I would insist on a community college or a trade school, something which is not cost-prohibitive.

I’m sure many parents wrestling with these decisions feel the same way.

There is no delicate way to say this: Much of what passes for secondary education in this country is a racket. Harvard not reducing tuition is an act which declares that the price point for entry is basically the name of the institution on the diploma. Forget about the actual substance of the education; the Harvard name is being viewed as the primary source of value, and for wealthy people who (not incorrectly) realize how much the Harvard name can mean in terms of getting the right connections and the right jobs, paying full-flight tuition doesn’t seem like a bad deal in spite of everything else. It doesn’t make it right, but it does mean that in a cold, cutthroat context, Harvard’s bottom-line analysis might not be hugely erroneous strictly in terms of how much money the school might recoup.

To be sure, this is appalling behavior by Harvard. It sits on an endowment of roughly 40 billion dollars. It should be using this endowment to provide financial relief for families and economic support for its employees, but it has plainly not taken that leadership position. It just wants to haul in as much money as it can instead of using its immense resources in this time of crisis.

Washington State isn’t in the same universe as Harvard in terms of wealth and resources, but it remains appalling that the school would try to use strong-arm tactics with students and families instead of doing the decent and appropriate thing: not charging for room and board if the school closes and has to cease on-campus educational operations.

We are brought to a bottom-line reality: We’re trying to make an effort to play college football so that American universities will gain back a measure of revenue and will stave off the fullest extent of economic collapse. TV money from football is meant to reduce the scope and severity of a financial crisis for these schools.

Yet, if these same schools are going to act like vulture capitalists — swooping in and preying on vulnerable students who might feel backed into a corner with no other good choices to make in a pandemic — the appetite to want to save these schools suddenly diminishes (or even vanishes).

We’re trying to play football in order to improve the balance sheets for our universities. If our universities won’t support students and families, however, why the heck are we doing this?

It’s a question we all need to confront. Now.