The Latest Victims of COVID-19: Colleges and Small Universities

By April, most universities had shuttered their doors as the coronavirus stampeded across the country; for Urbana University, MacMurray, Holy Family College, and potentially hundreds of others, those doors will not reopen. 

While larger universities were being lauded for creating safety mechanisms to retain international students, they are only doing so because these students are a principal source of revenue.

Many smaller universities are ending enrollment, and chopping athletics and academic departments. Though smaller universities seem to be disproportionately affected, behemoth institutions like Stanford are not immune. Despite the gravity of the fallout, misguided discussions of faculty recalcitrance and student apprehension have detracted from the larger issue: An insidious political economy has transmogrified higher education from a public good to a commodity, one that could soon be in scarce supply. 

Having already shed light on the harrowing failures of our for-profit health care system, coronavirus is now laying bare the precariousness—and potential demise—of our heavily privatized university system. The two are, of course, interconnected: Astronomical tuition covers the cost of  would-be socialized services, such as professors’ health insurance plans. 

In fact, ballooning tuition prices pay for other wildly inflated expenditures, like administrative salaries. Such positions in U.S. universities grew nearly 30 percent between 2000 and 2014, with higher level administrators raking in enormous gains. President Amy Gutman of the University of Pennsylvania takes home an unconscionable $3.2 million a year, while head of Baylor University Ken Starr took home nearly $5 million a year in his tenure. 

U.S. universities are, in short, corporations. Their value is often determined not by the caliber of the education they provide, but by the starting salaries of their graduates. The conflation between income and excellence calcifies this business model, gearing institutions not just toward market outcomes for their students, but also toward market solutions for their own problems. 

In light of the new ICE crackdown (now, fortunately, abandoned) on international students, universities may be further compelled to adopt insurance policies to buffer future falls in revenue from shrinking international student bases. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign did exactly that in 2019, in response to the flaring U.S.-China Trade War. While larger universities were being lauded for creating safety mechanisms to retain international students, they are only doing so because these students are a principal source of revenue. 

Indeed, U.S. universities have historically gone to great lengths to secure millions from international students. Ensnared in the grips of capital, institutions of all sizes are making financial decisions focused more on their financial streams than the wellbeing of students and  staff . For smaller institutions, this bargain is particularly pernicious: risk the lives of faculty and students by mandating an on-campus fall semester or risk the sustainability of the university itself. 

Market logic begets market outcomes; an en masse shuttering of universities would likely send the cost of higher education—already expensive—skyrocketing as supply plummets into the hands of  universities with the wealth to stay afloat. Much like market concentration generally, this will disproportionately impact people of color, widening the already gaping divide in educational outcomes between Black and white Americans. 

The pandemic only accentuates this reality: historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are already being “doubly hurt” by the pandemic and are more likely than peer institutions to close. In those that remain open, enrollment will wither; for Florida A&M and others, by as much as 20 percent. With high concentrations of students who have aged out of foster care systems and shelters, the closing of HBCUs could leave many Black students not only without an education, but housing as well. 

It is no coincidence that Black students are concentrated in precisely the kinds of institutions that are being most ravaged by the pandemic. As the protests rocking the nation have made all too clear, justice for Black Americans is long overdue and inseparable from the economic and environmental justice movements of our time. Education is no different. For-profit systems run on racism, and a reckoning of the U.S. university system needs to account for the racial violence that undergirds it. 

The pandemic is merely a proxy for the true crisis facing smaller universities: a failed model that is now pitting the lives of actual people—who are disproportionately people of color—against universities’ bottom lines.