COVID-19 may cause permanent changes in the higher education system

Universities and colleges across the United States closed their doors and moved to the Internet in March 2019. As the COVID-19 outbreak began, instructors scrambled to provide online learning for thousands of students. At the University of Washington in Seattle, that meant online learning for more than 40,000 students.

“It became apparent very quickly that this was something that wasn’t going to go away soon,” says Mary Lidstrom, in an interview with the journal “Nature.” Lidstrom is the university’s vice-provost for research. 

The University of Washington isn’t the only educational institution that has to look at how they function and work on dealing with other challenges that have been long-standing issues, like tuition costs, and, as Nature put it, “perceptions of elitism.”

Because of the pandemic, created by the novel coronavirus, educational institutions have shifted classes online and may keep those online classes; they are also anticipating fewer international students will enroll.

“The pandemic is speeding up changes in a tremendous way,” says Bert van der Zwaan, former rector of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and author of Higher Education in 2040: A Global Approach (2017).

These changes are putting financial pressure on these organizations. Revenue is plummeting as international students and others rethink their college plans and endowments are feeling the effects of the stock market’s fluctuations.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, many of the professors who taught on campus during that semester had to scramble, according to Sanjay Sarma, the vice president for open learning at MIT. He says that digital platforms are not the full solution.

“Zoom university isn’t proper online learning,” said Sarma. “We don’t want to waste our proximity on one-way stuff. It has to be two-way learning.”

The challenges of moving education online aren’t the only worry that these organizations have. In the United Kingdom, universities anticipate a $3 billion shortfall because of potential drops in student enrollment. Universities in the United States expect to lose hundreds of millions in the next fiscal year, due to the pandemic. Educational institutions may close, or merge with others in order to survive.  

But, there are those who believe that the pandemic could lead to an increase in online education that will stay even after schools can reopen safely. For example, in Pakistan, the chairman of the country’s Higher Education Commission said that the commission is working to standardize online instruction and provide less expensive mobile broadband to students.

“We’re doing this in context of the virus, but we think these actions will have longer-term benefits,” such as producing students who are better trained for technological jobs,” said Tariq Banuri.