When Kashuan Hopkins walked into his weekly IT staff meeting at the University of Oklahoma on March 9, he was largely unprepared for what would follow. He had heard of coronavirus, but at the time, Oklahoma was still virtually untouched—only one case of COVID-19 had been confirmed in the state, and the first death wouldn’t be reported for almost a week. His boss, however, instructed Hopkins to accelerate training for Canvas, the online learning management system used by the university. Puzzled, Hopkins offered to schedule a couple extra sessions later that week, but was instead told to start scheduling “as many as you can.” Within 48 hours, Hopkins was conducting Canvas training for faculty virtually around the clock. On March 12, the university announced a suspension of in-person classes on its main campus—a suspension that would soon turn into a complete transition to online learning.

OU’s frantic effort to train hundreds of teachers and transition thousands of students on the fly was seen at colleges and universities around the world. Steps that would typically have been implemented over the course of years were telescoped into weeks and sometimes even days. The City University of Hong Kong, for instance, moved all its coursework onto digital platforms in just eight days, according to Canvas. This relative success belies an underlying failure: for years, elite schools have advocated for the value of in-person teaching. When the pandemic hit, they were forced into crisis mode.

With the coronavirus upending the service model and the economics of universities across the country, it is not at all clear how flexible America’s higher education system will be in the face of high costs, institutional barriers to change, and a longstanding belief in the value of the way things are traditionally done. A professor at Columbia Business School once told me that “all businesses will be disrupted in the digital age,” but added with a self-satisfied smile, “except for us, of course.” The American affection for the residential model is understandable, but as Mitchell Stevens, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, told me, it also comes with an astronomical price tag: student costs significantly higher than those in other countries; oppressive student debt; and exclusion from top universities for a wide range of students who can’t afford to leave behind family commitments to spend years on campus.

Some of the support for the residential model reflects a belief in the value of in-person teaching and the rites of passage associated with going away to college. But it also reflects economic self-interest. Postsecondary education in the United States is an almost $700-billion-a-year business, and tuition and fees associated with residential colleges are a primary and critical pillar of this educational economy. Administrators, faculty, staff, and housing providers, to name just a few, all have a stake in this enterprise. Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has predicted that more schools would begin to announce they’ll go online-only in the fall—after they receive a wave of tuition and housing deposits.

Despite the institutional biases against online learning, the hasty, unplanned transition online has seen some real success among university students. In a recent Longevity Project and Morning Consult poll, 33% of respondents said that they were “very satisfied” in their online version of college, and another 43% said they were “somewhat satisfied”—relatively strong numbers for something cobbled together in a matter of days. Terri Cullen, a professor at the College of Education at OU, told me that once teachers “began to think outside the construct of time,” they started to take advantage of unique features of digital learning. Even in the courses that rely on in-person activities, teachers found interesting workarounds. Cullen described a biology class that replaced field studies with 360-degree photos from the field, then shipped $25 microscopes to every student so they could take samples at home and analyze them with virtual lab partners.

Those successes, however, are balanced against ongoing challenges that come with the fact that elite schools have failed to embrace online learning. Sydney Maggin, a rising sophomore who’s planning to major in illustration at Parsons School of Design, praised the flexibility and responsiveness of faculty in this new environment, but also lamented the loss of access to the Making Center, a three-story lab of cutting-edge design and production technologies. Some faculty members have struggled with the technology and with the fact that what works in the classroom does not always translate online. And some students have faced similar struggles. Eleven percent of respondents to the Longevity Project and Morning Consult poll said that technical issues were the biggest online-learning challenge they faced, and a very large group of respondents, 38%, reported that their biggest challenge was staying focused and on track with assignments, likely a systemic challenge that online educators would have to deal with.

Universities also have to contend with their own success in mythologizing in-person education. Even though a high percentage of students were satisfied with their online experiences, in the Longevity Project and Morning Consult poll, only 11% of respondents said they were now more likely to take online classes than before the pandemic, even if in-person instruction was available, and an equal number said they were now less likely to do so. And few are happy with the new economic equation. In a College Pulse survey, more than 90% of respondents said they should pay less in tuition if classes are online—an offer that few colleges have so far made. Maggin, the Parsons student, told me that while she recognizes the school needs a consistent revenue stream to pay faculty, administrators, and maintenance staff, she still didn’t think it was fair to charge full tuition because she “relies on the resources [at the school] and the value of the New York experience.”

This all comes at a perilous financial time for schools and students alike. “On March 1, the financial infrastructure of higher education was by no means secure,” said Stevens, the Stanford professor. “State legislatures had been cutting budgets for public higher education for a generation. Public universities were increasingly relying on full-paid out-of-state and international students to support their basic operations. Student loan debt had exceeded $1.6 trillion, such that Americans owed more in education loans than they did on their credit cards.” The events of the past three months have only exposed these problems further, as schools face the disappearance of full-fare international students and declining government support. Virtually every state is facing a budget gap in 2020, and higher education will likely be one of the first victims of reduced state spending. In early July, for instance, the state of Maryland slashed $131 million from its higher education budget. Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced that international students won’t be able to stay in the U.S. if their school goes online-only.

The massive money crunch driven by COVID-19 could well lead schools to seek more cost-effective ways to do business. A professor at the University of Virginia told me he had pre-recorded all his lectures for a large survey class, and noted ruefully that this meant it would be hard for schools to continue to justify hiring faculty, like him, to teach the course fresh every time. But the fast-moving nature of the crisis and the deep-seated roots of the residential model may blunt the opportunity. Stevens told me that most schools are “very much in short-term crisis-management mode” and seem focused on returning to “normal,” regardless of the consequences. The fear is that colleges may create broad public risk—Stevens colorfully likened reopening Stanford or the University of Michigan to reopening beaches in South Florida—but they will miss out on an opportunity to rethink elite education to be more agile and inclusive. “I think the commitment to return students to campus is misguided and reckless,” he told me, and “makes no pedagogical or public health sense.”

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