...
Only now, in the dog days of late July and August, are some of them finally coming to their senses. On July 29, Georgetown University announced it was reversing course and going fully online. Johns Hopkins and Princeton followed the following week. Others will fall in line.
Better late than never, perhaps. One can be relieved that universities made the right decision in the end. But what was the delay about? Was it just an elaborate charade to persuade students and parents to commit to enrolling before they changed their plans? Was it all a gigantic bait and switch? Or just hubris and wishful thinking driven by business strategies?
“My suspicion,” wrote a University of Michigan economics professor back on June 15, is that “colleges are holding out hope of in-person classes in order to keep up enrollments.” “If they tell the difficult truth now, many students will decide to take a year off.” The financial consequences for most residential universities would be catastrophic.
To be sure, universities have been thrust into this situation by the lack of federal guidelines. A sane government would have warned early on that campuses would have to stay online for another semester in service of the collective effort to contain the pandemic.
Left to look after their own interests, however, university officials focused on their small corner of the world, pretending they would find a way to open campuses and persuading parents to put those tuition deposits down.
【Bait and switch? 诱饵替换】相关文章:
最新
2020-09-15
2020-08-28
2020-08-21
2020-08-19
2020-08-14
2020-08-12