The crisis of higher education is worse than you think
If it’s been more than a few years since you’ve attended or taught at a university, you might be surprised by how different campuses feel now, compared to even the late twenty-teens. Much has been written about a negative vibe shift—young people, e specially college-aged young adults—are palpably more depressed and anxious than they were before the pandemic. The increase in depression has been especially pronounced among the demographics most likely to attend college: young women, the socially conscious, and people from middle class backgrounds. While we usually can’t quite put our finger on exactly how or why, most of the college instructors I speak to agree that everything just feels off.
My campus went full remote in March of 2020. We didn’t resume any in-person instruction until August of 2021. You’ve probably read a piece or two about the academic unpreparedness of that year’s group of incoming freshman. I assure you it was much worse than however bad you assumed it be—universities large and small bent over backwards to fudge the numbers and make student performance look less disastrous than it was. My colleagues and I were told—first informally, then directly—to go easy on the kids. Then to maybe consider not giving any grades below a B to the ones who showed up at least half the time. Then, uhh, maybe also extend that to the ones who didn’t show up.
At the start of the resumption semester, I was as nervous as I’d ever been. Throughout 18 months of relentless Zoom meetings and farcical teaching sessions, I had seen the charm and vitality drain from my rapidly bloating face. Would I remember how to control my voice? Pace the class? Getting them to speak in a virtual setting was like pulling teeth, but that’s because they all had their cameras off (we were not allowed to ask them to keep them on) and, well, they were probably just as checked out during my fake classes as I was during the fake meetings I “attended,” microphone muted, eyes staring strategically forward into the camera while reading posts and listicles while my colleagues muttered. How was I going to generate conversation when I and everyone else around me hadn’t been able to do so for a year and a half?
