This current school year has already been moved to all online in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. But now, administrators and students are looking to the fall and wondering if they will be able to go to school again, and if they do, what it is going to look like.
With the amount of students that are so close together in lecture halls, it would be a huge risk to have them go back to school as it was before. This is why many universities are trying to think of ways to make it safer and yet somehow closer to normalcy.
Many are talking about converting arenas and auditoriums into lecture halls, so that students can still attend lectures but stay socially distant from one another. Of course, this kind of class is more beneficial to the smaller colleges, whose classes are small enough to fit into these kinds of venues with ease.
But larger universities will face a much greater challenge in making that work. With large class sizes, it becomes more complicated to find a space where they can assemble for lecture and still remain safe.
And then there is the issue of sports, especially the ever-popular college football season. Athletics drive a large stream of revenue and income for the schools, and they are going to have to look very different this year. If the season does happen, it will most likely have to be without fans, which will take away ticket sales. But if they allowed fans to attend, they would be putting them in danger of spreading the virus.
Then there is the issue of tuition for students. If colleges are going to go to full-time online again for the fall semester, then what is fair for them to charge students? Students aren’t going to want to pay the high tuition-rates to just get online classes. If tuition stays the same then housing, meal plans, and more are all things they are paying for and not getting. Can schools afford to lower tuition if they go fully online? Some of the bigger schools can survive, we are sure, but the smaller ones are most likely not able to do that.
The coronavirus has completely changed the world, and once integral social practices are now different. This will be the same when school starts up again in the fall. No school wants to be the first to announce they’ll be re-opening, and none wants to be the first to say they’re going online until 2021. It’s a waiting game right now as we all wait to see what changes in the coming weeks.
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