The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued new guidelines last week to help higher education institutions plan for the fall amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It described closing residence halls as the “lowest risk” option for housing and suggested alternatives like allowing fewer students to live in dorms. It also said closing communal spaces like kitchens and dining halls, providing takeout meals with disposable utensils instead, will be safer.
As universities weigh these possible new realities, experts fear that limiting campus facilities – or keeping them closed – will exacerbate disparities for low-income students, even if it’s the right call.
“The decision to shut down campus as a response to a global public health crisis was the right decision,” said Dr. Anthony Jack, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “But that does not mean that food and housing insecurity, economic scarcity, is not a fundamental problem. … We typically think that students [who] make it to college have a golden ticket and now all of their worries are now done … and that’s fundamentally not true.”
Jack finds low-income students tend to rely on campus facilities for basic needs. His research showed that before the COVID-19 crisis, one in seven students typically stayed on campus for spring break, often because they couldn’t afford to go elsewhere, he said. And even then, closed dining halls during that one week of vacation left students scrambling for affordable meals, as he detailed in an article for The New York Times in 2018.
Meanwhile, for students working on campus or in their college towns, campus closures are “both a pink slip and an eviction notice,” at a time when their families may especially need the income, Jack said. So, if they are returning home, it’s to families that are more likely to be financially “precarious.”
Campus facilities are a vital safety net, he said, and their absence is strongly felt.
Dr. W. Carson Byrd, associate professor of sociology at the University of Louisville, emphasized just how wide that safety net is – and how wide it needs to be in a pandemic.
