IN EARLY MARCH of this year, our cohort of Boston University journalism students was on spring break just as the COVID-19 outbreak suddenly became very real.

We were halfway through a three-semester master’s program that costs over $85,000 in tuition alone. Even with scholarships, everyone was sacrificing something to be there.

So when our university moved classes online, we understood, but we were also worried. How were we supposed to acquire essential skills like photography, video, and audio production from home?

We figured that for the moment we should be patient and focus on making the best of a difficult situation. Surely when the crisis passed, there would be some discussion of how to make up for the instruction we had missed out on.

Why did we think that? Perhaps we thought so because universities, both public and private, present themselves as institutions that exist primarily to ensure the academic progress and well-being of students.

But no discussion came. At the end of the semester, we were told BU had done the best it could in unprecedented circumstances and there would be no reimbursements or credits of any kind to lessen our loss. BU had a budget shortfall of its own to rectify.

Why the financial health of such a wealthy institution should take precedence over that of tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff is unclear to us.

BU, like many private universities, files returns with the IRS as a public charity, which means that, unlike other corporations, it is exempt from paying income tax, including on the investment portfolio largely responsible for growing its $2.3 billion endowment. The IRS grants this benefit to educational organizations under the condition that they “present formal instruction as [their] primary function.”

But BU’s behavior in recent months leads us to question whether education is truly the university’s top priority. In the past five months, BU’s troubled finances have served as justification for a series of cuts to the heart of the university’s purported function as a center of learning and research, including a hiring freeze, salary and pension freezes for existing faculty and staff, and widespread layoffs.

In the late spring, a campaign of doublethink began to take shape in the university’s communications with students. In the face of requests for reimbursements or a discount on tuition, the official line was that our remote classes were worth just as much as the in-person experience we were supposed to receive.

Meanwhile, the university has continued to advertise its plan to resume in-person instruction during the fall semester, despite no sign of the pandemic letting up and against the will of many faculty members and local authorities. Why force so many employees to risk their health? Apparently in-person classes are essential to the “BU experience.”

Or perhaps the pretense of in-person instruction is necessary to justify not lowering the cost of tuition. A recent memo circulated to professors advised against using words such as “value” in order to avoid “[drawing] attention to the financial dimensions of attendance at BU, which is not the aspect of the student experience we want these communications to emphasize.”

As things stand now, BU is set to reopen in September with a hybrid teaching format called “Learn from Anywhere,” which the university advertises as giving students “a choice of attending in-person classes or taking classes remotely.”

In reality, it is unclear how much actual in-person instruction students will receive under this model. If class sizes remain the same, it is unlikely that students will be able to attend all at once while also respecting social distancing measures. Not to mention the possibility that a second wave of COVID-19 cases could force Massachusetts to reinstate stay-at-home measures.

Either way, BU has its own bottom line covered. A new disclaimer now adorns the top of the tuition and fees page on the university’s website: “Tuition and fees will not be refunded in the event the mode of instruction changes for any part of the academic year.” The university has also raised tuition by 3.9 percent from last year’s rates for good measure, a move that would bring in an excess of $75 million if enrollment numbers were to remain the same.

These policies will disproportionately affect low-income and minority students. They belie the lip service BU pays to social justice, and are especially puzzling considering the university’s ability to help level the playing field.

BU is among the top 120 universities with the largest endowments in the country. Collectively, the value of these endowments reached $598 billion in 2017, enough to fund the US Department of Education nine times over.

What is the purpose of accumulating this much wealth if not to serve as a lifeboat in times of crisis? The same question occurred to Wharton School professor Peter Conti-Brown after he observed the widespread budget cuts universities were making in order to avoid dipping into endowment funds in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“Universities use their endowments as a symbol of prestige and a point of competition between peer institutions,” he wrote. As a result, “[they] will strive to avoid endowment liquidation to the fullest extent possible, even in times of crisis.”

The endowments universities fought so hard to protect during the Great Recession recovered after just a few years. BU’s own endowment more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. But the generation of college students who graduated during that time are still feeling the effects.

If universities like BU took the long view, they might realize that their best chance at securing enduring prestige, as well as a better future for all, is to ensure that a generation of financially, physically, and mentally healthy young people enter the workforce.

They might even rediscover their true purpose and earn their tax-exempt status.

Sofie Isenberg and Devyani Chhetri are graduate students in journalism at Boston University. Isenberg is a 2020 Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, and just completed a fellowship at WBUR, a Boston NPR station. Chhetri has been a regular contributor to the Sun Chronicle in Attleboro and has previously worked with IndiaSpend, an Indian data journalism initiative.