Degrees of separation: universities and covid-19

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. With Ramadan now underway, a pattern has become clear. Muslims in Asia are celebrating the holy month in much the usual praying, fasting and feasting together. We ask why Asian leaders find it so hard to enact and enforce lockdown policies. And counting a population is practically impossible without a proper census. In North Macedonia, one was abandoned and one is being delayed. So it's unclear whether the Balkan country has a million and a half people or a third more than that. First up, though. Many universities in Britain and America were already set for a difficult year. Now COVID 19 has hit finances hard. Yesterday the British government dismissed a 2 billion pound bailout request from universities for research funding, offering instead to help just with tuition. Across the Atlantic, the American Council on Education believes revenues in higher education will decline by $23 billion over the next academic year for the one third of American universities operating with deficits that will make a precarious financial position dire. With students sent packing and classes shifted online indefinitely, it's becoming clear that not all institutions will make it through the pandemic.

McMurray College has a very long and colorful history.

Beverly Rogers is president of McMurray College in Illinois.

It was begun as a college where women could learn more about politics and the state and those types of things. And it wasn't until the mid-50s that a college for gentlemen was also established. And then of course, McMurray became a CO ed institution in every sense of the word. And it's true, we survived the Civil War, First World War, Second World War, the Korean War, Vietnam, et cetera.

The private liberal arts school recently announced it will shut its doors for good this month after 174 years.

We were working with an investor on some bridge funding that could have allowed us to implement a new plan that we had developed. I think we were really and seriously on the verge of doing things that we needed to do for some time. And Covid hit. Money tightened up and we were unable to get the financing that might have given us the bridge.

McMurray faced challenges familiar to America's small liberal arts colleges, discounted tuition that didn't cover the cost of operations and sluggish fundraising.

The pandemic was just perhaps the last straw that prohibited us from moving forward in it was not the cause, but it certainly has been devastating since because of not being able to have students back on campus and our students having to do remote learning and only a week for our professors to transition from on ground to remote learning and everything that's gone along with trying to keep people informed, it's been very difficult.

The pandemic has brought to a boil issues that were already simmering for universities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Like any other business that brings lots of people together, quite often in a confined space, universities are having to rethink how they operate.

Hamish Birrell is the Economist's public policy correspondent.

But it's not just teaching that's being rethought, it's their business model. Lots of kind of long held assumptions about being able to recruit students no longer hold, which means the university's finances are now under extreme pressure.

And what sort of shape were British universities in before COVID 19 hit?

So universities were attracting a lot of students. The total amount of money being spent on higher education was rising year on year. But not all universities were benefiting from that. Some of them were struggling to attract students and were running pretty big deficits. And even some of the bigger, more successful universities took on quite a lot of debt to to build new facilities on their campuses. Before the crisis, that didn't necessarily look like a problem. Now it looks a bit riskier.

And so why has the pandemic hit universities particularly hard, do you think?

The main reason universities have been hit so hard is for collapse in international travel. This cuts out a key source of income for universities, foreign students, and it's something that universities around the world are having to deal with. Nevertheless, British universities are particularly vulnerable. That's partly because they've been so successful in attracting foreign students. And it's partly because foreign students pay fees which are so much higher than the ones paid by domestic students. Last year, foreign students provided at least a fifth of the income of 48 higher education institutions. And universities are also worried about domestic students. The question there is whether students are going to be more keen to avoid a terrible labour market or, or more keen to avoid will probably be pretty terrible lectures received via Zoom.

So the British government has announced a new bailout package of sorts for universities. Do you think it will go far enough?

In short, no. The main bit of the package is 2.6 billion pounds, but this is money that the universities were going to receive anyway. It's just been brought forward. The package also introduces restrictions on recruitment. With universities only allowed to recruit 5% more students than they had been forecast to recruit anyway, that won't be enough to bridge the pretty sizable gaps in their finances. So it's likely that a later date, the government will face decisions about whether to intervene to protect individual universities.

The discussion around businesses more generally has been simply that the pandemic will make some of them simply shut their doors forever. Do you think that will happen as regards British universities?

It's possible that we will see the collapse of some universities that are facing difficulties, but there are issues with that approach. And it's likely that lots of universities who may require government money will be in parts of the country that the government has promised to level up to improve their prosperity. And letting a university which is a big employer go bust is not a good way to do that. So the universities which will probably have reason to be most concerned will be those who produce graduates with relatively poor prospects, but are in relatively well off parts of a country.

In America, a similar calculus is playing out. The first stimulus bill included nearly $14 billion for universities and colleges, but that fell short of what the industry claimed was needed. McMurray's Beverly Rogers says there should have been an assessment like the one being considered in Britain about the economic impact of allowing schools to close.

The question about should we have been offered help in some sense, I say yes, because our economic impact statement and plan that we had done showed that McMurray College contributed $40.4 million to the economy of Morgan county and the contiguous counties. And I can't help but wonder how much money, time and energy it would take to. To solicit and secure another clean business to come into Morgan county and provide that kind of income and impact for the lives of the people in Morgan county and surrounding counties.

So now, instead of donning robes for McMurray's graduation ceremony this weekend, Dr. Rogers is instead working to ensure those not graduating can transfer to another university if and when they reopen this autumn.

We don't know yet if we'll be able to have a graduation or commencement, but we will try our very best to have a conclusion for these students and also for faculty, staff and Alumni.

This year's Ramadan began in late April, but the month of prayer and daytime fasts broken by nighttime feasts will necessarily be curbed. Large swathes of the planet are under restrictions or lockdowns. Yet Ramadan is being celebrated almost normally in many parts of Asia, home to most of the world's Muslims. It seems that few governments in the region are prepared to put public health before piety, even if some places are much quieter than usual.

In usual times. Chalk Bazaar, which is in the heart of old Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, it's heaving during Ramadan. Usually thousands of street hawkers are out selling biryani and kebabs and above all, jalabis, which are sticky spirals of deep fried batter soaked in a sugary syrup. And most Bangladeshis consider jalabis to be essential for the evening meal known as iftar, which breaks the day's fast.

Dominic Ziegler writes Banyan, our column on Asian affairs.

But this year, Chowk Bazaar during Ramadan is nearly deserted. There have been a few vendors who attempt to set up stalls, but they're chased off by the government's baton wielding goons, police and soldiers. So what has happened is that, for instance, jalabis, which can't be bought in families, favourite sweet shops, are being made at home and often with less than perfect outcomes.

And so it sounds as if in Bangladesh the Ramadan celebrations are not getting in the way of efforts to contain the pandemic.

Well, I mean, Bangladesh, like many Asian countries with large Muslim populations, has imposed restrictions on how Ramadan is to be celebrated in order to contain the COVID 19 epidemic. So, for instance, the Bangladeshi government in early April urged people to stay away from mosques and pray at home. And then just a few days before Ramadan, it became more specific, restricting attendance at mosques to just 12, and that includes the imams. But having said that, outside Dhaka, many mosques in rural areas and small towns are still open for business in the countryside. You know, many of the religious believe that the virus is a punishment from God. And that's also a belief that is widely held in the refugee camps on the border with Myanmar housing Rohingya Muslims. And so for these people, more attendance at mosques, not less, is the fitting response to Allah's punishment.

And so it's a all told. It's a fairly mixed picture then. I mean, is that the scenario that you see in other Asian countries with big Muslim populations?

Well, in some places the regulations have been clear and they're being adhered to. For instance, Singapore has closed mosques until further Notice it's also closed the Ramadan bazaars, which are as popular with non Muslims as they are for Muslims. These are bazaars selling household goods, home decorations, clothes and the like. They've all gone online. Similarly in Malaysia, where the government extended its lockdown to mid May at the earliest. Mosques are live streaming worship. And an important dimension of Ramadan for the religious is zakat, which is charity, the giving of alms donated to the mosque and to religious organizations. In Malaysia, these arms have been collected at drive throughs as well as online. So yes, in those two countries, regulations are by and large being obeyed, but crisply issued and enforced rules in many parts of Asia are the exception, not the rule.

How do you mean? Where are the countries where things are a little less enforced?

Well, it's more fuzzy. In for instance, Indonesia, which is the world's biggest Muslim majority nation, there typically large numbers of migrant workers working in the cities, but coming from the countryside, they return home for Ramadan, particularly for the festival that marks the end of Ramadan, Eid Al Fitr. The government was slow to ban this return home. And by the time it did, just before Ramadan and giving people three days notice, well, by then tens of thousands were already on the move back to hometowns and villages. And elsewhere in Pakistan, the Prime Minister, Imran Khan imposed restrictions too little and too late. And meanwhile, prominent clerics have pressed the government to declare that lockdowns don't apply to mosques. And that, among other things, has brought out doctors in protest who believe that giving in to the clerics would be dangerous. A compromise was reached in which a list of distancing measures was agreed. But a survey shows that 4/5 of mosques appear not to be following the rules.

And is there any evidence emerging that these kinds of half hearted or late arriving measures have had a kind of epidemiological consequence?

No evidence yet, but we do know that religious gatherings can very efficiently spread the coronavirus. We saw this in South Korea where a large Christian church was the source of a huge cluster of infections. And we also know that huge jamborees organized by a Muslim missionary movement known as Tabligh I Jama', at, which has tens of millions of followers, are responsible for big clusters of infections in Pakistan, in India and Malaysia. We also know that pilgrims returning from shrines in Iran have also brought infections with them to South Asia.

And so why do you suppose it is that there is this tension then in Muslim populations across Asia in terms of how it's dealing with restrictions and the perceived risk?

Well, at a local level. Bear in mind that many imams are poorly paid and they have a powerful financial incentive to welcome the devout to their mosques because it's during Ramadan that worshippers are at their most generous in giving alms. But more broadly, there's a bigger issue. Religious leaders in Asia have plenty of clout and politicians are reluctant to stand up to them. Now, this stands in contrast to much of the Arab world, where authoritarian state rulers have hobbled religious leaders. In effect, clerics are state appointees and will do the government's bidding. It's different in Asia where the religious authorities are more powerful. So for instance, in Indonesia, President Joko Widodo, who's normally known as Jokowi, has long been accused by religious conservatives of being insufficiently pious or even of being a closet Christian. So he has felt the need to pander to Islamists in order to safeguard his political position. In Pakistan, where the state for decades has held itself up as the defender of Islam, the prime Minister, Imran Khan, knows that just the snap of a cleric's finger would bring tens of thousands of protesters out onto the streets of Islamabad, the capital. So, yeah, the pandemic terrifies governments across Asia. But for several Asian leaders, the self declared emissaries of God are just as much a threat.

Dom, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

To follow all of the Economist's coverage of the COVID 19 pandemic and how it's swiftly reshaping the world, visit economist.com Coronavirus in some ways, how many people live in a country is the most basic number there is? The word state is right there in the origin of the word statistics. But the population is a number that has escaped statisticians in North Macedonia, formerly known as Just Macedonia, the country sits between Greece and Kosovo, another part of what was once Yugoslavia. While a long running fight about the country's name was at last put to rest last year, the Greece's neighboring region is also called Macedonia. The matter of just how many people there are in North Macedonia is proving even trickier.

Officially, there are precisely 2,077,132 people living in the country.

Tim Judah is our Balkans correspondent.

And what's extraordinary is that even the head of the statistical office, a man called Apostol Simowski, told me that it's completely wrong. He says he thinks that there's only one and a half million people in the country, but he says since they haven't had a census, I cannot prove it. If that 1.5 million figure is right, that's really extraordinary. That means that the population would have dropped by almost 25% since independence in 1991.

So how is it that the country's.

Statistical office doesn't know these numbers?

In North Macedonia, like most countries of the world, they count their population every 10 years or so. And they did this in 2002, where they had apparently a rather reliable census. Then what happened was that in 2011, it got really nasty because about a quarter of North Macedonia's population is ethnic Albanian. And there the political parties began to get involved because the ethnic Albanians wanted to push up inverted commas, the number of their population, and the ethnic Macedonian nationalists wanted to push it down. Basically what they did was that they encouraged all their supporters and as many people as they could get to, to register as many family members as possible who didn't actually live in the country, but who were abroad and thus ineligible. So they just aborted the whole process. And since then, they haven't had a census. However, last month, they were due to have one. And then, annoyingly for the statisticians of North Macedonia, what happened was that a snap election was called, so they had to postpone doing the census.

And so what about the numbers that we can actually get our hands on rather than estimates and the like?

We know that in 2019, more Macedonians died than were born. For the first time in history. We know that at least 71,000 of Macedonian citizens have acquired a Bulgarian passport. Now, the reason that they've mostly acquired these Bulgarian passports is because Bulgaria is a member of the European Union, and North Macedonia is that means that if they've got these Bulgarian passports, which are kind of relatively easy to get, they can work without a problem in the European Union, or at least that used to be the case.

So it sounds as if quite a lot of people are spilling out of North Macedonia as well. Why is that?

It's the classic pull and push factors. If you can go to Germany or Austria and Switzerland and earn 10 times more than you would do at home, well, a lot of people are doing that, but even people we know with good jobs and good salaries are leaving. And that's because a lot of people have kind of lost hope in the future of the country.

Why is it so important to get.

The precise population number right?

Well, for the very basic reason that if you don't know how many people in the country, it's very difficult to plan properly, planning for health, education and literally everything else.

So when do you suppose this mess will be resolved? Will we ever know with some precision.

What the actual population of North Macedonia.

Is, well, fingers crossed, they will actually have a census next April. And if they have a census, and if the nationalist politicians of both sides are kept out of the whole census operation, then I think it's possible that in just under a year's time we will start to get a true picture. But it's been a very long time coming.

Tim, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you very much for having me.

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