Many students depend on student housing and accommodation during the year – a safe and stable space conducive to learning. The COVID-19 pandemic forced colleges shut down, leaving many students who come from precarious household situations to fear for their future.
The argument
On-campus housing is an important feature for many students who come from unstable homes. Therefore it is important to reopen college campuses for the fall 2020 semester to guarantee all students have access to safe spaces to live and study. Attending college is a privilege in America, but not all students are privileged. When Covid-19 forced students to leave their campus dorms and return home, some found that they had nowhere to go. On-campus college housing is a safety net for some students who have housing and/or food insecurity. With the help of scholarships and federal loans, living on campus can be relatively inexpensive. Some students come from unstable or unsafe homes, and therefore college dorms provide a safe space for them to live for most of the year. For example, LGBT+ students whose home lives are homophobic and toxic. Colleges offer more than just an education, they provide safety for many of their students who come from precarious backgrounds. Colleges should keep their doors open so that students have these safety nets in the fall.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The need described is real and the remedy proposed is far larger than it. Keeping residence halls open for students who have nowhere safe to go is a separate decision from resuming in-person teaching for an entire student body, and many institutions did the first without the second in 2020 — housing students with insecure or unsafe home situations while teaching remotely. Since the two can be separated, the housing need does not establish the conclusion. The reopening the argument recommends also risked reproducing the harm it was meant to prevent. Campuses that returned to in-person instruction that autumn experienced rapid outbreaks in dense residential settings, and a number reversed course mid-semester, sending students home at short notice — the same abrupt displacement described here, with less time to prepare for it. A policy justified by the promise of stable housing has to reckon with the possibility that it delivers a more disruptive version of the original problem. The risk also falls partly on the students the argument is concerned with. Students from low-income households are likelier to return to multigenerational homes and to have untreated health conditions themselves, so an outbreak that begins in a dormitory does not spare them. The sibling position holds that the humane response is to guarantee housing and support directly to those who need it, rather than to make full reopening the vehicle for delivering it.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] That campus housing is a safety net argues for keeping residence halls open to students who need them, which many institutions did while teaching remotely; it does not argue for resuming in-person classes for everyone. [Rejecting P2] Reopening carried its own risk of displacement, since campuses that returned in autumn 2020 saw outbreaks and mid-semester reversals that sent students home abruptly and with less warning.