Local and national economies depend on schools

The argument

Local economies, especially college towns and cities, depend heavily on the business brought by college students in the area. Restaurants and bars will be especially hard hit if students don't return for the fall semester. This not only impacts the economy on a financial level. Many of these businesses which depended on college students will be forced to lay off employees as business dwindles in order to keep running costs low. People's livelihoods are at stake if the bulk of their consumers don't return. In some big college towns, students from multiple colleges and universities make up over half of the town residents. Students rent properties, buy food and drinks, go shopping – without this kind of cash flowing through the towns and cities, all manner of businesses will be negatively affected. Only approximately 23% of colleges and universities in the US will be returning for primarily in-person classes, while over a third will be mostly online or hybrid platforms. College towns and cities depend on the academic year (September - May) for the bulk of their revenues. Without this source of income, college towns, especially small rural ones, face total economic collapse as their primary source of income does not return. These economies have been build around the colleges and universities and were doing well – attracting businesses and generating employment and town revenues – up until March when students were sent home. College/university students are vital components of many towns and cities and key drivers of local economies. To keep these students away risks destroying local economies which will in turn lead to ever wider economic fall out as cash flows dry up and money stops circulating in these towns and cities.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument weighs one side of a two-sided question. It establishes an economic cost of keeping campuses closed and sets it against no estimate whatever of the health costs of opening them — infections, illness, deaths, and the onward transmission from a young, highly mobile population into the surrounding towns whose economies it is defending. The comparison it declines to make is the question the debate asks. The mechanism was also tested within weeks of this being written. Campuses that reopened for in-person teaching in autumn 2020 experienced large outbreaks; many reverted to online instruction partway through the semester; and studies of counties receiving returning students found significant increases in case rates. Reopening therefore did not reliably deliver the sustained student presence that local businesses needed — in a number of college towns it delivered a few weeks of trade followed by restrictions, quarantines and the closure of exactly the bars and restaurants the argument seeks to protect. The economic claim is partly self-undermining for the same reason. Student spending is concentrated in venues that outbreak conditions close or restrict, so the scenario in which students return and spend as they did before requires the pandemic to behave in a way it did not. The argument's own statistic points away from its conclusion. That only about 23 per cent of American institutions were planning primarily in-person instruction reports what those institutions concluded when weighing the same considerations, with better information about their own circumstances. Presented as context, it is in fact evidence that the balance of judgement ran the other way. Finally, the sibling position holding that the decision should turn on outside data is not addressed at all — and it is the position that most directly accommodates everything the argument establishes.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Student spending is real, but the premise weighs one side only: the cost of closure is set against no estimate of the health costs of reopening, which is the comparison the question requires. [Rejecting P2] The mechanism was tested in autumn 2020 — campuses that reopened experienced large outbreaks, many reverted to online teaching mid-semester, and counties receiving returning students recorded significant case increases — so reopening did not reliably deliver the sustained student presence local economies needed. The argument's own figure, that only around a quarter of institutions planned primarily in-person teaching, reports what those institutions concluded weighing the same considerations.