The Class of ‘24: Entered College During COVID-19, Graduating Among Protests

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, the protest movement in the United States sweeping through campuses is just weeks before graduation. This year’s college seniors are mostly the same group whose high school graduation was disrupted by the COVID pandemic. Wall Street Journal higher education reporter Douglas Belkin talks to Hari Sreenivasan about the unique circumstances facing these students.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Douglas Belkin, thanks so much for joining us. You wrote an article recently. I want to read the title here, “They Entered College in Isolation and Leave Among Protests. The Class That Missed Out on Fun.” Tell me what is it that characterizes these students? Because it seems like this is another sort of ripple effect of the pandemic that we are all collectively witnessing.

DOUGLAS BELKIN, HIGHER EDUCATION REPORTER, WALL STREET JOURNAL: Yes, I think that’s right. Their experience was just more isolated than their predecessors have been. They’ve been less social, they’ve been in their dorm rooms more, in the gym less, in the cafeteria less, on the quad less, in class, in-person less, they’re studying with their friends less, they’re not joining clubs to the same degrees. They’re just not as engaged with one another as students on college campuses were before the pandemic.

SREENIVASAN: Tell me who are these students demographically? What have they experienced over these past four years?

BELKIN: So, the kids who are graduating now, if they went through in four years were seniors when the pandemic landed, and a lot of them did not have graduation ceremonies at their high school. They spent their summer isolated. They didn’t have freshman orientation in person, and they began college, a lot of them either online or in their dorm rooms, isolated from one another because of fear of COVID, they were told, when they walked around campus to stay six feet apart from one another and to, you know, constantly wear masks. So, these kids are really endured the brunt of COVID with regard to isolation.

SREENIVASAN: You know, we can understand that there were effects on campuses over that first year and a half, two years when these students were isolated there. But what are the kind of longer effects that have happened to what you and I think of as old men, what college was like when we went?

BELKIN: Well, for these kids, there’s a lot of interesting data that’s sort of being surfaced now looking at their behavior. So, there are companies that tracks, they don’t like that word, but they track students using their cell phone to get a sense of how the campuses are used. And they’ve been doing it for a number of years. And if you compare the movements, the students had on campus prior to the pandemic to today, they just don’t move as much and they don’t go to the same places and not around each other as much. So, that’s, I think, the most significant issue. The other one is, I mean, we’ll get to this a bit later, but the mental health issues and the surveys that are designating, you know, trying to ascertain how they feel and their levels of anxiety is significantly raised, this has been happening for a while, but it did amplify, in some cases, over the pandemic.

SREENIVASAN: Tell me a little bit about the mental health status. I mean, where are we getting the information, which student cohorts, if any, are affected most or least?

BELKIN: Yes. So, mental health on college campuses is tracked very closely. It matters a lot for some practical reasons and some less practical reasons. I mean, the one thing if students are depressed, so they’re not engaged in college, it’s just less likely to graduate. So, engagement matters a lot. Mental health matters a lot. If kids are depressed, they’re not going to go to class and they’re not going to finish. And this, of course, impacts the bottom lines of the universities. So, that’s in their interest to make sure that they are taking care of the kids who are there. And around 2012, we saw a decline in mental health and a raise in anxiety and then depression around the times that the cell phones, pocket cell phones became ubiquitous. That trend continued into the pandemic. But the reliance on technology during the pandemic seems to really have stuck. And so, the kids are more inclined to want to be on their phones, on their computer screens now than they were before. So, you know, you may have an option of taking a class online, in your dorm room, or go to the class. And a lot of kids are opting to just sit in their dorm room to take the class. What that means is they’re just more isolated and they’re avoiding anxiety that comes from social interactions that a lot of them fear.

SREENIVASAN: Now, is that measured in some way on an annual basis? I mean, you know, are there universities that kind of take surveys as freshmen come in about what their feelings were before they got to college or their annual surveys that measure specific kinds of, you know, outlooks that these young people have on life?

BELKIN: Yes. So, there’s a lot of surveys and a lot of instruments national that try to measure this stuff. There’s one called the Healthy Minds Survey that we looked at out of Michigan. There’s a number of universities that are connected to it, but Michigan is one. And what that survey found was that anxiety is up, social anxiety is up. Kids who believe they’ve been traumatized doubled from 5 percent to 10 percent over the course of the pandemic. The level of self-harm, the level of kids who have tried to commit suicide, it’s up a little bit. The level of kids with suicidal ideation is now one in seven of kids who’ve thought about suicide over the past year. So, the numbers are sober.

SREENIVASAN: That’s — those are intense numbers. I mean, so what are universities doing about this, if they know that the freshman coming into their college are already more anxious and they’re telling the universities that their levels of self-harm and suicidal ideation are up, what can a university do? What is a university doing?

BELKIN: So, they’re really attacking this issue because it’s so important. You know, most professors now have had mental health first aid training so that they can recognize if students are depressed, if there’s — if they’re fearful for them. There’s something called the Red Folder that professors pass around that sort of keeps tabs on students and the ones that they believe are struggling. You know, it gives them options about how to talk to them and treat them. So, professors are sort of the first line, that wasn’t happening a few years ago. That’s one big thing. There are care teams that try to identify students who are struggling. I think we spoke to folks at Tulane that they have failure tales. Kids are anxious about failing. And so, they go into community and they tell stories about things that they blew. And the idea is to sort of take the pressure off of each other so that they come to the sense that it’s, you know, it’s OK to screw things up. That’s part of growing up. Part of life. They’re encouraging kids to join different groups. What’s fascinating about it is that there’s, I think, a sense that the return to normal is beyond the cajoling of the administrators and their professors, the kids sort of have to find their own footing and no one’s really sure, you know, where that new level set will be.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you managed to find a resident assistant at the University of Puget Sound, something that I was several years ago. And what was stunning about this anecdote is they’re talking about trying to lure young people out of their dorm rooms. I mean — I, you know, when college started for me, it was the absolute antithesis of that. I mean, it was for the first time for most students living away from home, right? The doors kept swinging open and close. You’d be going in and out of everybody else’s rooms. What’s happening to that kind of social interaction and mingling that for so many generations before college was so crucial for?

BELKIN: Yes. So, there’s a cycle that’s picking up speed and that’s sort of at the center of it, right? So, if you spent your senior year of high school — part of your senior year of high school and your freshman year of college, and maybe even part of your sophomore year of college in your dorm room taking classes online and being told to isolate, and the skills that you should have developed and that you developed as a young man to interact with your peers are a little bit retarded. They didn’t necessarily take root. And so, when it’s time to connect with other people, there’s an anxiety attached to that now. And so, one way to avoid that anxiety is just to not deal with it. Sit in your room, take the class online where you’re comfortable, where you can control your space. You can sit in your sweatpants. You don’t have to worry about being called in by a professor. If you do go to class, the professors are saying that, generally speaking, kids aren’t as prepared and they’re less likely to raise their hand into debate. They’re unnerved about being a part of the discussion and being called out. There’s other issues, I think, of, you know, step (ph) is saying the wrong thing. It’s also, this has been around for a month prior to the pandemic. But these are all issues that are sort of aggregating and forcing some kids to retreat.

SREENIVASAN: Does that climate post-pandemic contributed to the situation on certain college campuses today where, right now, there are protests that are going on, some of the colleges have decided to postpone or cancel their graduations, but the acrimony between students and what I see is a lot of students disengaging from, well, important conversations that, you know, in my opinion, say, well, you’re going to learn from somebody else if you’re able to talk to them about it? But according to your article, maybe some kids are not.

BELKIN: Yes, there’s a lot of things happening with those protests and it’s been fascinating to interview kids who are part of them and ask why they’re there and what they know. And I think you put your finger on a real significant issue, people aren’t talking to each other. And I think there’s always been some of that when you have an emotional issue you care about. But there’s not a conversation happening. I think there’s also an attraction for some students to join these protests because, you know, they can stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder and get a sense of community that they really haven’t had since they’ve been in college, and then that feels good. It feels good to connect with one another, to be kind of — it’s almost everybody’s saying the same thing and believing the same thing, so you’re — it’s almost a low stakes situation if you follow the script. Not to demean what these kids are doing or believing in, but there’s a sense, I think, of community that’s really important. On the flip side, it’s a really polarizing issue. So, you’ve got students that haven’t made the connections on campus that, you know, normally they would have over time and they’re angering one another and they’re losing friends because they’ve posted a meme or a message that the other side doesn’t agree with. So, we spoke to a number of kids who say they are just alienated from friends. This is, I think, particularly sharp among a lot of the Jewish students on campus.

SREENIVASAN: Are there things that you’re looking for as we watch this wave of college protests play out across the country in terms of, you know, what the long-term impacts could be on students or perhaps even how colleges are responding to these protests?

BELKIN: There’s this tension between the right to free speech and the Title VI rule that says you’re entitled to an education free of harassment. The universities has to try to keep students safe, but how they do that is really not been adjudicated. And so, the courts haven’t waited, which means that we’re in this legal no man’s land when the university president tries to figure out how to handle protests. That’s probably going to change. You know, some of the Office of Civil Rights cases that they’re hearing now are probably going to be challenged when they come out. They’ll go to court. And some judge somewhere is going to say, this is what you have to do when a protest happens, or there’s some — there’s going to be more guidance. So, I think that going forward it will be a little bit less latitude for universities to determine how to respond.

SREENIVASAN: Yes, you know, you had a quote in there, the pandemic bruised the psyche of a generation, the politics seared it. Explain how, you know, today’s political climate is shaping this generation.

BELKIN: You know, when you speak to a kid who’s 21 years old now, they’ll recite a litany of the things that they were born into, right? I mean, so they came along not long after 9/11. They dealt with the Great Recession. They were around for the school shootings, that’s been part of their norm. The Trump presidency polarized the country. And obviously, you know, we were heading that direction before. The pandemic was massive. So, they came into college feeling, I think, on their back foot. This is — by and large, they’re a little bit less risk taking than prior generations have been because they’ve seen the downside of things that can go wrong. They’ve seen chaos. Every generation has their own cross to bear. You know, you speak to people who are in college during Vietnam, and they sort of scoff at the notion that these kids had it rough, but from the perspective of the students on campus, they feel like they’ve had a pretty rough first couple of decades.

SREENIVASAN: You also have written beyond the higher education system kind of what happens to the rest of society as these waves of classes come into the workforce. What are the challenges that employers see from the generations, I guess, really mid pandemic onward that have come into the workforce, these are not just trends from the pandemic, but they might have been accelerated as you point out?

BELKIN: Yes, the employers are seeing a decline in the capacity and the competency of kids coming out of college. And we’re just beginning to see this now. You know, there’s a lot of data coming out of high schools and elementary schools about learning loss that happened. But when in college, what we’re seeing are kids who are graduating and passing licensing exams, like nursing or engineering at lower rates. They don’t have the same capacity. But once you do pass are often at lower scores. The social — the rightness of students is declined, right? And you see a lot of kids who don’t make eye contact when they’re in a — you know, a retail spot, working a job like that. So, there’s a lot of concern that this generation that knows less and is less inclined to ask, to learn. And of course, you know, the whole issue with sort of being stuck on their phone and not communicating and connecting with people has been of concern for a decade.

SREENIVASAN: Is there any indication that you have from the conversations you’ve had from the conversations you’ve had that the college experience will return to what we might have gone through? I mean, not that everything that we went through is all roses, but that we would possibly see greater face-to-face interaction again and, you know, avoid some of the things that this generation over the last two or three years have dealt with on campuses?

BELKIN: The college for all model is certainly fraying, and there’s also a demographic cliff, that means that fewer kids are graduating high school and so, there are fewer of them to go to college. So, there’s this wave of schools that are consolidating and closing that’s beginning to shape up. The schools that survive, I don’t see why they wouldn’t respond and become places of community and where kids will re-engage. Human beings are awfully strong and, you know, in figuring out a way forward. The kids who were in school during the pandemic, some will recover and some won’t. We’ve looked at studies about lifetime learning loss for kids who were in school during things like natural disaster. In Argentina, for instance, there was massive teacher strikes for years that kept kids out of school. In Pakistan, there were tremendous earthquakes that destroyed whole villages. And when you compare the children who were around those natural disasters and didn’t go to school for a year or two, they didn’t catch up. What happened is they got discouraged. They didn’t take the next step in school. Their lifetime earnings declined. There’s one professor researcher at Stanford who suggests lifetime learning loss is probably around $70,000. So, how that plays out, you know, people are looking at it, but it’s future tense right now.

SREENIVASAN: Douglas Belkin, higher education reporter for the Wall Street Journal, thanks so much for joining us.

BELKIN: Thanks very much for inviting me.