A twenty-year professor on making amends for COVID-19: A year of free college

How to make it up to the high school and college students we’ve let down so badly.

Graduating high school seniors had just about the worst last semester of high school imaginable. No spring musical, no prom. No graduation, and no graduation parties. Trapped at home, with your family. No spring college visits as those decision dates approached. And now, probably, no college to go to. Things were pretty lousy for enrolled college students, too — who were sent home in March, on very little notice, for an indefinite week or two that turned out to be the entire semester.

And now, those new freshman, and the rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors, have no college to go (back) to. Every decently-run institution has already announced an all- or nearly-all online Fall 2020 semester; it remains to be seen whether it will be different by Spring 2021. Even those announcing on-campus instruction know it will bear little relationship to the college life students long for — big lectures and small seminars and labs; meals in the dining hall and late-night hangouts in the dorm lounge; games and concerts; student groups, fraternity parties and life in a busy college town. In their places will be — maybe — masks and sparsely-populated buildings…