Four years ago, the trajectory of our lives changed forever. COVID-19 was officially declared a national emergency in March of 2020, leading to the shutdown of thousands of American schools and a hole being ripped out of the high school experience for millions. Lockdown forced us into social isolation for years, the American economy was devastated and more than 1 million Americans died from the virus.
If you’re an 18-year-old college student, the two and a half years that comprised the pandemic era account for 13.9% of your life. To think that such a large chunk of our young lives were gobbled up by a global pandemic is a truly devastating realization. Many of our formative years were defined by this period, yet the pandemic as a whole has largely become an afterthought in our lives. Honestly, even writing about it feels taboo.
Nobody wants to talk about COVID-19 anymore. I get it. Who wants to be reminded of what can only be described as a tragic period of collective pain? In conversations with friends and family, on news outlets, in pop culture and in our classrooms, the pandemic is almost never a topic of discussion. Instead, we’ve shifted our focus to the countless other issues affecting our lives, pushing the pandemic on the back-burner where it can hopefully stay buried.
The problem is, by letting our collective consciousness move on from the pandemic, we’ve allowed the ramifications of COVID-19 to fester. Despite 59% of Americans believing the pandemic is over, nearly the same percentage of people think life has not returned to normal. Our desire to put the pandemic behind us is ultimately why we’re still subject to its aftereffects.
This fact is even more prevalent in the lives of college students. Our mental efforts have become consumed by the worries and responsibilities that define university life. There’s no time to ponder the ramifications of the pandemic when we must navigate the social, emotional and academic problems that compound the college experience.
Yet, as we trudge along through the four years of college, desperately hoping to meet the requirements of higher education, we need to remember that there is nothing normal about our educational journey. There will only ever be one group of college students who were in high school when the pandemic irreparably damaged their educations back in March 2020. And that’s us.
In our collective desire to forget about the pandemic, we have blindsided ourselves to how much the college experience has actually been altered. Our ultra reliance on technology for learning and social interaction is a direct effect of the social distancing and online education we got used to during the pandemic. For the same reasons, traditional educational experiences are also becoming obsolete, as we are witnessing an increased desire for individualism marked by less student attendance and engagement. Our feelings of anxiety and depression emerged due to the mental health crisis that the global pandemic exacerbated. The pain, grief and shifting social norms that arose from COVID-19 have dug their claws into the fabric of our young lives — a reality we choose to ignore.
To let this sink in even more, let’s compare what life was like when the pandemic began to what life is like today. Now, if you’re a college student in 2024, you are likely in the same class standing you were in high school when the pandemic began. With that being said, in many ways we are in the same place we were when the pandemic began. The parallels in class standing imply a similar sort of educational experience at that point in a four-year institution. For example, if you’re a senior in college about to embark on a new stage in your life, you’re likely experiencing a lot of the same uncertainty you felt in high school when you were about to venture into a college environment defined by the pandemic.
Just as the pandemic’s emergence in 2020 reshaped our high school experience, the lingering impact of COVID-19 has also reshaped our college experience, disrupting how we engage with our educational journeys. For seniors tackling an uncertain future, for freshmen who are entering this newly transformed landscape and for sophomores or juniors who find themselves in the thick of these social and academic challenges, we need to face COVID-19’s aftermath head on so that there can finally be healing.
If we want to move on from the pandemic and all the pain associated with it, there has to be remembering and then grieving. It is our collective obligation to discuss the pandemic and its aftermath. By advocating for knowledge and understanding of lacking or stagnant academic progress, we can finally start to push the college experience forward on the path toward recovery.
Max Feldman is an Opinion Columnist who writes about culture, at the University and elsewhere. He can be reached at maxfeld@umich.edu.