How students flourished during pandemic
A year after an EF-5 tornado blew through Joplin, Mo., then-President Barack Obama came to deliver the commencement speech for Joplin High School graduates, class of 2012. That ill wind has killed 162 people and injured more than 1,000. The rubble had been cleared, but the scars remained.
Joplin was not — and still isn’t — Obama country. It is solidly conservative, but people lined the highways to see the presidential motorcade pass.
When Obama took the stage at Missouri Southern State College, he told the graduates that the tornado had changed them, and that people will always remember how others responded after that wind blew their lives to smithereens.
Because they’re from Joplin, he said, they would always remember the kindness of strangers. Because they’re from Joplin, those students would go through their lives understanding that they possessed the ability to live through awful events, often with grace and often with humor.
I am from the Joplin area, and I can still work up tears reading the transcript of that speech. I’ve been reading it as I think about this year’s college seniors.
On a recent morning, I met with one of those students over Zoom, a video conferencing platform I’ve come to loathe. It was 9 a.m., and the student looked tired. I commented on his eyes being at halfmast, and he laughed and said he was just getting home from his job at a laundromat, where he’d already put in a three-hour shift. After our meeting, he said, he’d go to class, then maybe take a nap. I think there was another class later that day, and then practice.
At some point, he said he would sit down and do homework, then go to bed, only to wake up and do the whole thing all over again.
In a little more than a week, that student — the first of his family to attend college — will get his degree. Although faculty members are supposed to sit quietly until all the names are called, I don’t think I will.
Students juggled jobs, and concerns and fears. They worked through quarantines, and sometimes, they Zoomed into class when they were as sick as they’ve ever been. They fell behind, caught back up, and lived and sometimes thrived in an unprecedented time when college life looked nothing like the college life for which they prepared. They turned their cameras on. They turned their cameras off. They let family pets walk through the frame. They — in the finest sense of the word — persisted.
I am so proud of those students. We professors may have struggled, as well, but we professors are older and had the benefit of experience to fall back on. Students made it through a challenging time with scant little perspective on what it is to live through a challenging time.
These seniors were toddlers when the terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. What they know of 9/11, of the world wars, they’ve read in books.
Everyone in academia is feeling the pandemic’s long reach. A 2020 study said 35 percent of undergraduates screened positive for major depressive disorder, while 39 percent of undergraduate and graduate and professional students screened positive for generalized anxiety disorder. This was especially true for low-income students, students of color, and students in the LGBTQ community, the type of student higher institutions of learning very much want to retain. Those figures are twice as high as the year before.
Students have been challenged individually, while colleges and universities might be facing a bleak fall, if certain data play out. For one, vulnerable students may have to drop out — or they may have dropped out already. One recent study marked a decline in students filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), a form that helps students determine their eligibility for financial aid. Considering so many families have struggled to meet their bills during the pandemic, this is troubling.
As of late April 2020 —the early days of the pandemic — there were 1.89 million FAFSA applications filed, compared to roughly 1.78 million this year. That’s a drop of roughly 6 percent. That may not sound like much, but it’s enough to send alarm bells through college recruitment offices. According to the National College Attainment Network’s FAFSA Tracker, the most recent data says Connecticut was doing slightly better than the national average, with a 4.5 percent drop.
This comes after the number of first-year students dropped 13 percent nationwide last fall, from the National Student Clearinghouse. Community colleges, which have played an increasingly important role as a gateway into higher education, have been hit especially hard.
Add to that the U.S. Census Bureau recent release of 2020 census figures that say the country has entered a period of record low population growth — and a population shift that is tipping the scale toward the elderly.
None of these numbers bode well for Connecticut’s colleges and universities, but numbers can change, and those of us on college campuses just met some pretty incredible challenges.
And graduating seniors? Because you’re from Joplin — or, rather, because you are a member of the Class of 2021 and an honorary resident of Joplin — you’ve already done a very hard thing. We who struggled along with you cannot wait to see what you make of yourself.