Colleges should not have required all students to leave campus

The coronavirus upended life as we know it and closed countless educational institutions across the country for in-person instruction in March. In an effort to prevent contact transmission, many colleges, such as Harvard University and the University of Southern California, took early initiatives to close dormitories and residential areas on campus.

These actions effectively evicted students at certain schools for the duration of the quarantine, likely lasting through the summer at the earliest. While well-intentioned, the decision to remove students from college dorms may have actually created more problems for members of the student population who don’t have a place to go, such as international students and those from low-income families.

For starters, schools like Harvard and Yale requiring students to leave campus and find somewhere to stay, considering the short, often 4-5 day time frames they were given, was a logistical nightmare for many. Taking into account students from low-income families, who make up 20 percent of the country’s higher-education student population, and international students that make up another 5.5 percent, according to articles by Inside Higher Ed and IIE, this has in many cases led to huge upheavals in students’ lives.

The main issue was that many of these students attend school far away from their hometowns, and might not have the resources or an opportunity to get home to shelter-in-place with their families. 

Students may not maintain contact with their families or have other internal issues that prohibit them from going home. For example, it is difficult to expect international students to pack, find plane tickets, communicate with their families and also find a place to stay within four to five days, as many schools did.

News outlets covered several students’ experiences being expelled from on-campus housing with little to no warning and forced to stay with whoever will take them in on such a short notice. One Harvard international student called out on Twitter “the callous and irresponsible way” that his school handled this crisis, offering students a mere five-day notice and providing virtually no guidance despite many students applying for exceptions and administrational help. “I CAN'T go home to Jamaica, especially on such short notice,” he wrote.

The argument for implementing this strict housing expulsion policy lay in schools’ fears that large numbers of students would be infected as they interacted in common areas of their residential areas or used the same appliances. 

However, encouraging all students to return to their parents’ residences and their home communities so quickly risked spreading the virus further as international students scrambled to depart the country by plane; truth be told, it may have been better for them to remain on campus.

A generally better solution to minimize impact and spread of the virus on college campuses would still have been to implement remote learning through electronic devices, but allowing students without accessible or nearby places to stay to remain in their dorms for the duration of the quarantine. Spread them far apart, of course, but let them stay. Students from impoverished backgrounds often returned to crowded neighborhoods and the reality of having to work in their parents’ businesses — conditions far riskier than being on campus in some cases.

Colleges could have implemented policies to closely monitor residential areas and dorms to prevent actions with significant risks, regularly sanitizing or closing down communal areas. Effectively, this plan would still have given those at higher risk of COVID-19 and others who have available resources the option to leave, but would have alleviated the logistical stress for both colleges and tens of thousands of students who didn’t easily have a safe place to go.