On a breezy Sunday afternoon in early September, Marco Maldonado, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sat in a small courtyard behind his dorm, in the shadow of an abandoned academic building where the skeletons of forgotten plants lined the windows. Every few minutes, other students passed through the courtyard on the path to the dining hall. Most traveled solo or in pairs. When a group of ten—he counted—ambled by, Maldonado watched them until they rounded a corner. “Did you see that?” he asked when they were gone. “They did have masks, but they were all bunched up”—walking close together. “It makes me wonder what’s happening indoors, where people aren’t being tracked,” he said.
Maldonado worries about a coronavirus outbreak at UMass Amherst, to the point that he often has trouble concentrating during virtual classes. “There’s always the possibility of a flare-up, and they’ll have to throw everyone out,” he said. That prospect fills him with anxiety, although he’s not particularly worried about contracting COVID-19. “I would be more scared of losing my housing and having to go back home,” he said. “That seems like the greater hardship.”
For Maldonado, going home would mean moving in with his father, who rents a single room in an apartment near Boston from a family with two young children. Before the pandemic, Maldonado stayed there only occasionally, at Thanksgiving or Christmas, but, when his summer internship went virtual and his plans to visit his mother in Puerto Rico evaporated, he became an unwelcome addition to the household. He overheard the landlords complaining to his father that his presence “stuck out like a sore thumb.” They barred Maldonado from their Wi-Fi, which he had been helping to pay for. “I felt like I needed to leave, whether I could come back to school or not,” he said. Now Maldonado is one of just three hundred and sixty-five students who were approved to live on the UMass Amherst campus this semester owing to “extenuating circumstances”—meaning, essentially, because they didn’t have anywhere else to go.
This fall, most discussion of college students has revolved around the risks that they pose to others: the unchecked transmission at illicit parties, the campus outbreaks that could sow death in college towns. To date, the Times reports that at least a hundred and seventy-eight thousand coronavirus cases have been linked to institutions of higher education. Reopened campuses present obvious dangers, but shuttered dorms and dining halls create a more acute crisis for a smaller number of students, depriving them of stable housing, regular meals, and the broadband they need to attend virtual classes.
“It was my hope that colleges would do two things this fall,” Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who studies low-income students, said. “First, go one hundred per cent remote. And, second, invite back any undergraduates who cannot be full students if they are away from campus.” This group, Jack said, would include victims of domestic abuse and L.G.B.T.Q. students whose parents are hostile to their identities, as well as anyone facing food or housing insecurity.
The pandemic has exacerbated disparities that Jack has been highlighting in his research for years. When campus is open, administrators can imagine that students coëxist in the same, equal environment: sleeping in the same dorms, eating in the same dining halls, studying in the same libraries with assistance from the same staff and faculty. In truth, studies suggest that more than a third of students at four-year institutions were struggling with housing insecurity before the pandemic, and sixteen per cent had at some point been homeless. When college moved online, it became harder to miss the difference between the student frustrated to be trapped in her childhood bedroom and the one attempting to take an exam in his car.
The idea that universities owe support beyond financial aid to the students they recruit from poor backgrounds first gained attention in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when student groups for low-income and first-generation degree seekers began to organize for rights such as access to dorms and dining halls during school breaks. “There was an active taking up of a first-gen identity,” Bridgette Davis, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago who studies low-income students, and who was the first person in her family to graduate from college, said. “Had that groundwork not been laid, I don’t know where we would be right now.”
Since March, schools have stepped in to buy laptops and Wi-Fi hot spots for disadvantaged students, or created emergency funds to cover transportation and groceries. Davis argues that universities should go further, and view this semester as “an opportunity to prioritize these students,” she said. “You could have a cohort of three hundred high-need students come to campus and be their own pod, and you could have faculty engage with them in person.” Some institutions have adopted this model for first years, complete with seminars held in tent classrooms. Colleges “could be doing innovative things that acknowledge that high-income students are already getting these supports at home,” Davis said. “Instead, basically, you get a hotel.”
Davis’s proposals would represent an expansion of what it means for universities to serve as students’ guardians in loco parentis (“in place of a parent”), the legal doctrine that governs schools’ roles in their students’ lives. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the concept justified the control that universities exerted over students in the form of dress codes, curfews, and restrictions on their freedom of speech and assembly. Beginning in the nineteen-sixties, the meaning of in loco parentis began to shift: First, student activists won back basic rights of expression and assembly; then they argued that colleges owed them protection and care as well as freedom. Since the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the new in loco parentis has increasingly held that schools must provide a safe and equal learning environment (for example, shielding students from hazing rituals) and supply services such as mental-health counseling. In recent years, student activism around sexual assault has revealed the conflict between some schools’ promise to keep students safe from harm and their contention that drinking and partying fall outside their purview.
The dangers of the coronavirus have placed the concept of in loco parentis under new pressure: Universities feel newly compelled to patrol students’ social behavior in the name of health and safety, and many students are expecting more forms of support. Lucy Wickings, a junior at Harvard, was granted a room when the pandemic began because she is homeless. She suffered a depressive episode and experienced suicidal ideation while living on campus in the spring; she said that although she had told a professor that she was struggling with her mental health, and the professor had relayed the information to her dean, she often went weeks over the summer without hearing from any of the deans or tutors assigned to advise her. In July, she criticized the university on Twitter: “The fact that students on campus (or at least students like me) were NEVER checked in on in a formal / regular way during a PANDEMIC in which we did not have HOMES suited to take care of us, to me feels BEYOND neglectful,” she wrote. (Harvard declined to comment on any individual student’s experience, but noted that the college provides mental-health programming, most of which is virtual this year owing to safety concerns.)
When we spoke on the phone, Wickings described chafing at e-mails to the student body that advised them to cope with pandemic stress by spending time with their loved ones. “The assumption underlying everything was that people were at home with their families,” she told me. “But what about students who don’t have those things?”
Even if they have family support to fall back on, young adults have generally struggled with the isolation of the pandemic. “The transition to adulthood includes leaving home and developing community independently,” Nancy Hill, a Harvard professor and a developmental psychologist, said. Students stuck with their parents may resent the regression, but those on closed campuses are consigned to a more difficult limbo: “They’ve left home,” she said, “but they haven’t arrived.”
When I first interviewed Bella Thomas, a senior at Smith College, in early September, she felt optimistic about the coming fall. Thomas had spent six months without a stable address. She had been unable to finish the semester from the one-room house where her mother lives with her younger brother, but she had been afraid to apply for emergency campus housing that then seemed rife with unknowable risks. Instead, she crashed with an ex-boyfriend and his parents and then with an older sibling, only to land back at her mom’s house in July. Returning to Smith with roughly a hundred and ten other students was “a mostly okay situation,” she said. “I’m very grateful to be here.”
When we met in person three weeks later, her outlook had dimmed. Slouched on a bench by Smith’s Paradise Pond, tangling her fingers distractedly in her hair, Thomas told me that her math classes felt more difficult than ever before—she was used to solving problem sets through collaboration, but she hated Zoom so much that she couldn’t bring herself to find a virtual study group. Thomas felt deeply homesick and preoccupied with her family’s well-being. After months of searching for an alternative to living at her mother’s house, she had even considered taking the semester off to be with her.
“An advantaged student can live at home or in an apartment with friends and still have broadband Internet and complete their coursework,” Hill pointed out. “Students who are disadvantaged are being asked to trade being with their families in a distressed time for being able to complete their degree.”
Wealthy institutions such as Smith and Harvard can at least feed and shelter students who would otherwise struggle to stay in school. Elsewhere, however, many students may not be able to afford the emergency housing they’ve been offered. For most colleges, room and board are important sources of revenue; at public universities that have lost, collectively, billions in state funding since the last recession, these fees balance ransacked budgets. Public universities and community colleges, which educate the vast majority of low-income students, may be too cash-strapped to meet their material needs.
“You get less support from the government when you’re a student than when you’re not,” Sara Goldrick-Rab, the founder of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, said. For example, students aren’t eligible for many public housing programs. Goldrick-Rab argues that the best way to reduce housing insecurity on college campuses is to combat our country’s broader housing crisis, making shelter more available to all. “Students are humans first, and all humans need housing,” she said. She also advocates rewriting rules that exclude students from affordable-housing programs such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. The fact that students are struggling in a time of disaster “is not primarily a moral failure on the part of colleges. It’s a moral failure on the part of our government,” she said.
Matt Bodo, a homeless student at the University of California, Los Angeles, has lined up three jobs this quarter in an effort to pay his roughly fifty-five-hundred-dollar housing bill while continuing to send money to his mother. One of those roles is as a fellow with Rise, a student advocacy organization that has pressured U.C.L.A. to devote at least a million dollars from a recent $5.5 billion capital campaign to building a shelter for homeless students. “The university seems to have this idea that if you choose not to take out loans and be in crippling student debt, then at that point it’s your choice to be homeless or housing insecure,” Bodo said.
When Bodo left his dorm last March, he finished the semester as best he could from his car, attending classes on his phone. One professor required him to download a proctoring software to monitor for cheating during a midterm, and to prove that he was sitting at a computer in an empty room. Since that wasn’t an option, Bodo dropped the course. He was permitted to return to campus over the summer, though he was behind on his rent by the time we spoke in September.
“I couldn’t call living on campus anything but great,” he said. He liked having a routine, walking the same path to the dining hall every day. He appreciated having somewhere to do his laundry. Being surrounded by other students, even if there were only a few hundred on campus, fed his motivation to study. Recently, his mood had been buoyed by a realization. Since he first became homeless in his mid-teens, he’d never held a lease for more than six months, but U.C.L.A. had assigned him the same room for the fall that he’d lived in all summer. If he could find a way to pay for it, he would remain in that room longer than any place he’d lived in during his adult life.
More on the Coronavirus
- To protect American lives and revive the economy, Donald Trump and Jared Kushner should listen to Anthony Fauci rather than trash him.
- We should look to students to conceive of appropriate school-reopening plans. It is not too late to ask what they really want.
- A pregnant pediatrician on what children need during the crisis.
- Trump is helping tycoons who have donated to his reëlection campaign exploit the pandemic to maximize profits.
- Meet the high-finance mogul in charge of our economic recovery.
- The coronavirus is likely to reshape architecture. What kinds of space are we willing to live and work in now?
