What Is College Without the Campus? This crisis will reshape higher education — and not just this fall.

The mythical American curtain-raiser to adulthood, the four (or so) years of finding-yourself freedom and higher learning, is having a reckoning. May 1, the date when most colleges ask that the students to whom they’ve offered admission declare their intentions for the fall, has come and gone with many students (and their parents) unsure of what they should do. Facing the prospect of mass deferrals, many schools are granting families extra mull time because nobody, not the schools, not the families, not public-health experts or politicians, knows whether it will...