The Pandemic Is Exacerbating Wealth Inequalities Among Students

“We are moving all classroom instruction for all of our schools to virtual learning environments. Beginning Monday, March 16th, we are suspending all in-person, face-to-face, on-campus classroom instruction. This will continue until further notice.” This, or something comparable, was the message we both received from our respective universities in mid-March -- a message that made the Covid-19 pandemic move from a looming but mysterious warning to an imminent, tangible obstacle with which to contend. Our universities “until further notice” benchmark for when in-person learning could be reinstated quickly changed to the end of the Spring semester, and has since been extended again, with some caveats, through this Fall semester. As we -- two law school students and Equal Justice Under Law summer interns dedicated to fighting the criminalization of poverty -- navigate the glitches and missteps of learning the law through our computer screens, it strikes us that the pandemic has both uncovered and exacerbated the wealth inequalities that have always plagued higher education.

Certainly, as law students, we and our peers are among a group of people navigating this pandemic with relative privilege. And while we do not in any way mean to equate the difficulties we are facing with those of the many individuals and families currently facing eviction, food insecurity, and job loss, it is also a fallacy that law students are all in positions of privilege. Most full-time students cannot also work, and most summer internships are unpaid, meaning few law students have qualified for Coronavirus relief funds. Moreover, the exceedingly high costs of tuition and school fees leaves many law students in debilitating debt, and the vast majority of recent law school graduates make significantly less than they owe in student loans. Moreover, how society and institutions treat students and youth is indicative of our collective values; making decisions that leave students’ needs unaddressed or otherwise ignored does not bode well for how all people will be taken care of and considered as this crisis rages on.

It’s worth noting, before moving into a discussion of the ways that access to technology and housing are now more unequal and impactful than ever, that universities have not exactly been on our side throughout this unprecedented crisis. Though our respective universities and the universities our friends and peers attend profess to have students’ interests at the forefront of their decision-making, their actions speak much louder than their words. One of our universities, for instance, reduced next year’s tuition by 5% following the move to online learning and an announcement that all campus amenities would be unavailable, only after raising tuition by 3.6%. A school with tuition of more than $66,000 per year and a total estimated cost of attendance of $97,500 per year has now reduced tuition by only about $500, despite closing all campus amenities, moving all courses completely online, and enrolling a student population that has suffered immense financial loss during this tumultuous time. Unfortunately, this meager tuition discount in the face of extreme circumstances is commonplace for universities across the country, with millions of university students having to pay close to the same tuition, or even more, for an abridged learning experience. This, combined with universities’ opaque and infrequent communications with students regarding plans for the future, only adds insult to injury as we and our peers across the country attempt to navigate this uncharted territory.

One of the biggest challenges facing students as fall semester approaches is steeped in technology; our new world requires resources and tools that many of us take for granted, such as stable Wi-Fi, convenient download speeds, and dependable laptops or computers. These things have become more important than ever before, and being mindful of the gap in both resources and access that our nationwide move to digital learning has laid bare is vitally important in a country where, according to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data, the number of Americans with access to a broadband internet connection that meets FCC minimum standards was 21.3 million Americans, as of 2017. More worrying is a recent study conducted by BroadbandNow, a startup focused on increasing broadband access in the U.S. In February, the group presented research indicating that flaws in the FCC’s data collection had obscured the degree of the “digital divide” in the country; the startup estimated that 42 million Americans did not have the ability to purchase broadband internet, with rural communities suffering the most from this problem. This massive “digital divide,” while decreasing, displays the challenges of making education so dependent on digital means.

Additionally, the switch to heavy use of video teleconference services like Zoom have brought other issues, such as incidents of “Zoom-bombing,” in which individuals enter and disrupt video meetings, commonly with the use of racial slurs and threats. The occurrence of these incidents was so high that the FBI announced on March 30th that they would investigate such incidences, and one of our schools, the University of Texas at Austin, announced on the same day that they had encountered such a case of racist harassment at a meeting of UT students, staff, and faculty. Beyond the simple outcome of breaking up the flow of a class or meeting, these hacking problems only exacerbate the negative experiences of minority and disadvantaged groups of students trying to work and learn in communities that sometimes make them feel unwelcome. These incidents also place some university instructors in unfamiliar or uncomfortable roles, giving them the burden of dealing with the fallout of students being greeted with such hateful infiltrations. Beyond the security concerns is the larger problem of adaptation to a new work and learning style. People may point to the ways in which one can make meetings more secure against hacking but many don’t fully appreciate the speed and degree to which this pandemic and the ensuing movement towards virtual learning and work have forced people to attain a certain digital literacy that they may not have had to acquire previously.

That difficulty of adaptation plays out in different ways across different settings and circumstances. One of our mothers is an elementary school teacher and she and her colleagues have had to overcome significant challenges in adapting their teaching routines to an online model. Virtual instruction to young children, of course, brings out different difficulties than one might envision with graduate or undergraduate students. Nevertheless, teaching a large lecture class of first-year law students through a multi-paneled Zoom screen does not sound like an easy endeavor, and we are sure our professors are wondering how focus and engagement may be affected by long-term virtual learning, especially given the fact that so many professors note in their syllabi a preference for students to not use laptops in class for worry that they will fall prey to the distractions of a screen. These issues are compounded by the fact that virtual learning has also created a dynamic in which education has shifted from the collective standard of the classroom or campus to the highly personal surroundings and conditions of students. Those that have to share devices with family members or friends, or who don’t have the luxury of empty and quiet rooms with a stable connection to commit to learning face potentially uncomfortable positions due to differing degrees of access to technology.

In addition to unequal access to technology, students are also faced with housing hurdles. For the past few months, we and many of our peers have had to make difficult decisions about whether to move back home with relatives or stay in housing close to our campuses. While the former allows us to save on rent and care for family members as needed, the latter allows us to access campus facilities and extracurricular activities in the event that these things become accessible. The inevitable result of this choice is that students who can afford to live on their own or who don’t have family relying on them for care or financial support are at a distinct advantage. These students are not only close to their schools and able to opt in to many optional in-person classes, events, and activities, but are also, presumably, in environments more conducive to learning and working than their peers who may be in different time zones, sharing equipment, Wi-Fi, and space with their families, and physically or financially supporting their families.

This disparity is particularly acute among students who would ordinarily rely on on-campus housing, which has largely been entirely closed or drastically limited to allow for social distancing. With on-campus housing unavailable, students who can afford to rent housing off-campus will be able to stay close to their universities, access campus facilities and WiFi to the extent that these are operational, and form small study groups with peers who can also afford this option. The inequalities this creates will be especially profound at universities, like one of ours, that are offering “hybrid” models of learning for the Fall semester. Essentially, this means that some classes and activities will be offered in person, while others will be exclusively online, and all students “may choose to experience the full fall semester online.” Under this model of learning, students who can afford to live on or near campus despite finite on-campus housing options will necessarily have an advantage over their peers whose “choice” to opt out of in-person instruction may not be a true choice at all. Moreover, student Resident Advisors -- students who get paid or get free on-campus housing in exchange for supervising other student residents and maintaining housing facilities -- will largely be left completely in the dust by their universities’ housing plans. Many of these students rely on this option for access to housing, and as far as we can tell, these students have seldom been considered in schools’ reopening plans that purport to prioritize the needs of students.

Certainly, desperate times call for desperate measures, and we understand that universities’ decisions to move to virtual and hybrid models of learning have been made amid complex and competing concerns. Even despite the inconveniences and difficulties of learning the law through our computer screens, we don’t dispute that online learning is likely in the best interests of students and faculty, given the circumstances. What we do dispute, though, is the lack of concern from our universities and universities across the country for students and our lived circumstances. We accept that our schools have endowments to protect, donors to appease, and national rankings to maintain. But we refuse to accept our universities’ implicit suggestion that the wealth-based inequalities already pervasive and inherent in higher education be ignored, and thereby exacerbated, in decisions about how learning will proceed. Institutions of higher learning must ensure that all students have access to the requisite technology, take the necessary precautions to make online learning safe and accessible, and prioritize affordable and adequate housing options for students. To be sure, the financial cost of these changes can and should be born by universities themselves, and should not be pushed onto students. If our universities expect our continued participation and cooperation through these extraordinary times, they owe it to us to more thoughtfully and thoroughly consider our needs alongside -- or, dare we say, above -- their own.