.5% of the people in my county are infected with the disease. Yet i'm in a hot spot for the virus. It's fair to attempt to strike a balance between reopening and staying closed and consider both the risk of opening verse the risk of not opening. You can't do that if the discussion just leads to people jamming their fingers in their ears and saying you want everyone to die. Certainly it's something that should be decided on a locality level because the risk is different within different areas of individual states.
That's why I'm asking what evidence is there that shutdowns do anything to stop the spread of the virus? That's an honest question and there are countries that did less than us shutdown wise and have very similar results. If shutting down won't stop the spread of the virus (because other areas of economy are open, because humans will do what they want to do, or any number of other reasons) then what is the purpose of it? At that point to me the negative consequences outweigh the benefits.
Obviously this is talking about college but no reason the people upset think any different about K-12 schools. Here's a couple negatives from shutting down. Mandatory reporters won't see evidence of child abuse, school meals, negative impact on single parent households, negative impact on low income households, many kids simply won't attend school, and I'm certain there are more.