COVID Is Emptying College Towns That Desperately Need Students

[Music] live your genie move-in weekend at eastern washington university is usually one of the busiest times of year for this tiny town have a mask you can move your person here but this fall now that almost all the school's classes are online only a few hundred of its twelve thousand students are moving into the dorms do we wanna get one of those yeah we'll have to look for a card okay riley carlin a freshman is one of them it's really quiet okay this way this is not going to be fun to make by myself no it's going to be a pain i really thought about staying home but in the end i wanted that university experience so this was my way to get it [Music] let's hope there's no you know oven covered closure um yeah but take your things that you can and put in here you're gonna do great foodie okay no job right it just kind of feels like a rite of passage to be able to leave the nest you're gonna do great riley love you is this what you expected coming to school was gonna be like no absolutely not i was imagining that i would have my roommate when i came here and we were just gonna be the best of friends and watching netflix together so it's kind of been a really disappointing experience it's scary i mean my friends from high school are dealing with these outbreaks at these colleges with all the breaking social distancing that's happening here we're gonna have an outbreak that's it's just gonna happen [Music] eastern is the heart of cheney the school actually predates the town the businesses here rely on the university's students and faculty who double the population when school's in session without them cheney estimates it's losing at least a third of its revenue and that percentage will only go up the longer the university stays remote how many vacant storefronts are there we have about 22 now in a four block radius that's a lot yeah so this used to be a massage place that closed karate studio even the bank over there that close that closed because of cobit also they shut down during total bed these guys are fine huge vacant storefronts do you see any of this stuff coming back not anytime soon i don't see that happening until we see a real big resurgence of students douglas labar grew up in cheney he opened the mason jar eight years ago did you guys play d d last night and did a hunter contact you yesterday brett came in contact with somebody who had kovitz and she can't work she's a quarantine obviously i wanted to have a successful business but i also really wanted to have an impact on the community there wasn't very much down here at all especially one that could link different aspects of the community together the young college students they get to sit next to 80 year old farmers who come in how great is that on saturday we're 80 down in sales that day from the year before this year we're 45.24 down on that friday um jesus 65 65 on that day wow does that make you nervous yeah oh definitely you can barely pay your employees let alone pay for any of the supplies we went through eastern is one of roughly 600 regional universities four-year schools that mainly serve in-state students and are cheaper than colleges and universities with big names and endowments this is david may's first time addressing eastern students as university president he just got the job two months ago good morning i can't mute myself shortly after that november evening and his currents engulfing higher education natural national economy in turmoil and eastern will not be outside the effects of those forces good morning right now is the moment we decide if we are willing to take the hard challenging painfully bold steps required we cannot be what we have been the university has lost so much money since the pandemic started that it's had to cut more than 20 million dollars from its budget nearly 10 percent and raise tuition by two and a half percent its survival is now an open question 400 people have been impacted by personnel actions in some cases that was a layoff i think the number's 108. the grass isn't as neatly trimmed as as it usually is because we don't have as many people in that part of the university we've made cuts in staffing and academic affairs we've removed phones from faculty offices we've we've been looking for everything that we can possibly look for to try to reduce the impacts on people [Music] but at some point we are we have had to and we will continue to have to impact people's lives i'm smiling regional comprehensive is really designed to be the economic driver of the region in which it sits they're getting squeezed pretty hard right now if the university of washington wants more students they've got a waiting list the community colleges have innovated have developed new types of degrees they're also in some cases a slightly less expensive option than a regional comprehensive and so the pressures are kind of from both ends of the continuum what kind of student is eastern really serving we have a significant portion of our students who are pell eligible eligible for federal pell grants which means that their entire family household income is below 50 000 it's something that i take great pride in it's something that for me is sort of the core mission of eastern washington university if we lose a place like eastern we lose that point of access we lose the opportunity for the social mobility that that a college education brings we we lose a generation [Music] i love you forever yes baby i told you mama's right here mom i'm back baby when you have a family all of a sudden it's not about how do i take care of myself is how do i take care of them michael reed got his bachelor's degree from eastern back in 1996. after working there for 14 years he was laid off in june with just a couple days notice and one month's severance how'd that feel to have your time there end like that i would say extremely disrespected is how i felt i mean everybody was talking because everybody was wondering when if they were going to be next and once we began to understand just what the scope of it was going to be and how incredibly impactful it would be on the revenue for the university then we knew it was going to get really bad i don't know how much longer eastern as we understand it now is going to be around eastern is undoubtedly more diverse than the surrounding area yes what happens you know if that option goes away for students like that i think that could be catastrophic their target population is people who are kind of vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy vulnerable in ways that a lot of the people who go to princeton yale harvard just aren't i know i was one of those students so without eastern being a sure thing and keeping you here there's much less reason to stay here sweet darling that's you right after vice news visited reed's wife nikki who also worked at the university found out she lost her job too what happens if things don't get better in the spring personally for us as a business it'll be tough we luckily hopefully have enough town support but again how many of those people work at eastern and so it's just constantly like punching your fist against a brick wall you know maybe you'll get through at some point but it's kind of tiring and slightly exhausting after a while um i think we're finally getting a little momentum but of course then covet happens or stuff like this and all of a sudden you get punched back down and you have to work your way back up so yeah i think that's definitely a lot of it it's exhausting is there a point at which you kind of give up on chini i don't want to give up on tuning i don't think i will give up on cheney i think i just might need to hand it off to somebody else and so it's just kind of sad after so much work towards this it's like what where does it go from here and how long do we have to wait to be able to do those things and are we going to be able to pick it back up and keep it moving i don't know dozens of people on campus have already tested positive for covid since carlin moved in he went to the syllabus to find all those assignments right yes the original plan in this class of about 150 people was for me to be teaching it in a lecture hall of course that didn't happen unfortunately i still have the same number of students download adobe flash player acrobat reader sounds like we're going to be teaching ourselves a lot and of course have your antivirus protection i hate online school a boy talked to me yesterday he said that he saw my google home on the wi-fi connection list and he was wondering if i figured out how to set it up and no i cannot figure out how to set it up but that was i guess what college relationships are made out of eastern plans to keep classes remote until may it's kind of rough knowing that i'm paying more for online zoom classes where i'm going to be teaching myself a lot of stuff out of the textbook instead of going to in-person lectures and office hours it's all so unknown and it's it's a scary unknown you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 619,604

Rating: 4.8381701 out of 5

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020, Eastern Washington University, college towns, college town, coronavirus pandemic, college towns covid, eastern washington university dorms, online classes, eastern washington, cheney washington, cheney washington town, COVID Is Emptying College Towns, online classes college, college town economies, covid college, Covid college towns

Id: SZShVhclRbQ

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/bhollen1990]

To be fair...half of those store fronts have been empty for 10 years.

[u/dublf]

Sad reality. I just might drive out there and visit The Mason Jar this week.

[u/81toog]

It sucks but Cheney will bounce back when the students are there again

[u/AuroraGreen]

Thank you so much for sharing this. Wow.

[u/mattslote]

Thanks for sharing! I worked on the part of this shoot when they're in the dorms. Didn't know they released the final video.

[u/elitechad255]

I did some work for Michael Reid last year when I was a student employee. What a nice guy. It's so sad to see the situation he and his family are in now.

[u/9mac]

God damn that's a sad state of affairs.

[u/quaid31]

Thanks for sharing. The video hinted at the university potentially closing. I can’t imagine the state allowing this to happen.

[u/Gladget]

She got dorm room 420... nice