This is awful and I just can't understad how we have come to this, but I have some thoughts... https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/sep/24/thousands-of-students-in-isolation-at-20-uk-universities

First the obvious bit: the university sector has for decades been marketised & commercialised by government policy, made responsible for its own financial viability. As a result, it has built a (very profitable) infrastructure around a mode of delivery and 'student experience'.

That infrastructure includes accommodation (often tens of thousands of places), meal plans, sports facility memberships etc. In the absence of meaningful government support for the HE sector during the pandemic, these remain essential sources of income for unis.

As sources of income for unis they are also sources of income for the towns, cities, and regions in which the universities are located, which are in some cases almost completely dependent on the student and university driven economy: taxis, bars, private rental sector etc.

I don't subscribe to the view unis are just trying to make money by bringing students back btw. I mean this: their financial model is built on a system that cannot be sustained in a pandemic + gov has not stepped in to make temporary non-reliance on this system viable.

The other thing going on is that Office for Students, Gov etc is obsessed with F2F as 'the' mode of delivery, as if there is some kind of reduced quality to online delivery. Now, in ordinary circumstances I am 100% of the view that F2F is superior. It's the energy of it, you see.

In my experience there is nothing quite like the energy, vitality, interaction of a classroom--jokes, laughing, exploring, the out-of-nowhere 'what if?' question that takes the whole class and you in a direction you hadn't thought about earlier. This is learning; this is joyous.

But this is not F2F learning in a pandemic. That is people in a room wearing masks, worrying about how far they are from other people, freezing cold with windows open, not using PPT because they are apprehensive about whether the previous lecturer cleaned the keyboard properly.

There can be no arguments, no spontaneous bubbles of agreement and disagreement and 'but but but' and laughter. So does it matter *enough* that people are physically in a classroom together? Does that matter enough to take on all this risk? Frankly, no. I don't think so.

If the regulators & gov took a minute & asked themselves what they thought uni education was really about, they would realise that right now, in just these circumstances, it can be about quality engagement online & support unis in reducing on campus to what must happen in person.

Gov and OfS have locked themselves in to a vision of 'student experience' and to ideological commitment to HE as a market. They can't see the wood for the trees. Might students pay a reduced fee? Maybe. Will it cost less to educate them? No. Who should fill the gap? GOVERNMENT.

Lots of ppl are angry at unis, but IMO Gov's abdication of responsibility for the sustainability of HE is the root of this problem. That is what I am angry about: for students, for ppl teaching F2F, for ppl in uni management faced with no more than a range of awful choices.

I'm not saying anything here that people haven't been saying for ages. TL: DR marketising higher education is undesirable, and what is happening in unis right now is a product of decades of devaluing education as a good and recasting it as a product.