Published by The Boston Globe
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Students may be able to live in some dorms, but they may have to take lecture classes online, he said.
“It will not be business as usual,” Brown said.
Still, universities are eager to bring students back because empty campuses are a financial drain. For some smaller private colleges and regional public universities that are already floundering financially, being unable to open in the fall could threaten their very existence, higher education experts said.
“For some institutions, if they can’t get students back on campus in the fall, it will become an existential crisis for them,” said Craig Goebel, a principal with Art & Science Group, a consulting firm that works with higher education institutions.
Universities said they expect the next school year will be a costly one for them. Just how expensive will depend on when and how they will be able to open.
Already, many institutions, including BU, Brown, UMass, and Harvard, said they anticipate that they will have to offer students more financial aid for the next school year, cutting into their endowments and budgets. Parents have lost jobs or been put on furlough, and students who are expected to contribute several thousand dollars to their tuition costs, mostly by getting summer jobs, likely won’t be able to earn that money, university officials said.
It also remains unclear whether colleges and universities can charge students the same tuition if they take classes remotely instead of in-person, higher education experts said.
While students grumbled about paying the same tuition for online classes this spring, there may be a full-on revolt if colleges have not developed robust offerings or addressed the problem, Goebel said.
Elite institutions may be able to justify the tuition costs, and students may be more willing to pay it, he said.
But for institutions without the same brand recognition, that calculation for families may be far different. If they reconsider attending, that adds a further strain on college budgets, he said.
The question is, “how much are students and families willing to pay for that markedly different experience,” Goebel said.
Even if they are able to reopen and have coronavirus plans in place, many colleges said they are uncertain how many students will show up this fall. Traditional enrollment models that colleges rely on to develop budgets and course offerings are less useful in this new, coronavirus environment.
More students than usual are seeking advice about taking a gap year or semester off, and potential freshmen are weighing whether to attend a college closer to home or one where they don’t have to live on campus, said Claire Dennison, the chief program officer at uAspire, a Boston organization that helps high school and college students with financial aid.
Every year, some students weigh these questions, but now, "everything is ratcheted up,” said Dennison.