Getting children back into school is a “moral duty”, Boris Johnson has declared, despite the open question of how well prepared UK schools are to prevent the spread of Covid-19 – especially with the chief medical officer for England warning that “we have probably reached near the limit or the limits of what we can do in terms of opening up society”. Yet much less is being said about the return of university students to face-to-face teaching this autumn.

Many of the 2.5 million students in higher education, most of them undergraduates, will shortly be flooding into towns and cities far from home, more than half a million of them for the first time. They will come into contact with untold millions of local residents, but most closely with nearly half a million university employees, especially those whose job it is to teach them.

Universities are implementing measures to reduce health risks, including making students take a “Covid-19 community pledge”. But undergraduates are mostly of an age where, some people fear, they have tuned out the need to take safety measures seriously. It would be the glibbest of optimists – the prime minister perhaps – who could deny that students will make a significant contribution to Covid-19’s widely anticipated second wave.

If students represent a potential health risk, they also contribute much to local economies. Higher education is big business, with an annual income of £38bn. Manchester alone has a student population of at least 75,000, most of them concentrated in the south of the city. Some urban centres become ghost towns between university terms. And of course, without undergraduates – and their tuition, accommodation, food and drink money – higher education faces ruin.

Universities were already financial basket cases before Covid-19, some more than most. While there has almost certainly been mismanagement at some institutions, this situation was largely because, after imposing the £9,250 annual tuition fee in 2012, governments ran scared of doing anything more.

The Liberal Democrats were all but destroyed for their role in increasing the price of higher education, while Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 promise to abolish fees frightened Conservatives. So despite rising costs, fees have remained static, meaning that even before Covid, universities were significantly worse off than in 2012.

Now, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the impact of Covid-19 – the loss of international and EU students as well as an expected rise in young Britons deferring their studies – means the sector is likely to lose 25% of its income this year. Despite that, the government has offered very little financial help.

University managers are in a fix. In anticipation of tough times most have imposed cuts of various sorts, including redundancies, especially among part-timers. To mitigate future losses, many have also committed to “blended learning”: lectures will be conducted online, but not seminars, those small groups in which undergraduates discuss points raised in lectures to clarify or build on them. But to meet social distancing restrictions student numbers have to be halved, doubling the number of seminars. With limited rooms available, evenings and Saturdays are being considered.

Universities hope their insistence on in-person teaching will reduce the number of students deferring or even switching to rival institutions, because the fewer students this autumn, the more likely financial disaster. It is significant that in the US elite universities, such as Harvard, have turned their backs on in-person teaching this year because they can afford to ride out any hit. But without comparable endowments in the UK, even Cambridge has committed to face-to-face seminar teaching.

The evidence about whether online or in-person teaching is better is patchy and contradictory. It is uncertain students suffered any educational disadvantage when universities moved all teaching online during the spring. But what we do know is that online teaching involves absolutely no risk of catching Covid. Despite this, universities seem determined to force those lecturers they still employ into the seminar room.

How willing these staff will be is not clear. Academics’ workloads have increased substantially over the years, with greater numbers of students to teach and more administration, while their pay has been suppressed and pension entitlement reduced. They are among the most highly stressed employees in Britain. As a result, they have supported strikes in unprecedented numbers during the past two years. Despite that, and the existence of a risk-free alternative, their managers clearly feel they can push them that little bit more into putting their health in danger.