What it’s Really Like to be a College Student in a Pandemic
Right now, no one is going to argue that paying full tuition for online school completely sucks. This is my third year at a Big Ten school- that I once loved!- and after watching how my University is handling everything to do with the pandemic, it’s clear that my University doesn’t love me back. From opening the dorms, to resuming Big Ten sports, the University has made all the wrong decisions about how to proceed this semester.
Disclaimer: I’m a white member of the upper middle class. I’m aware of my privilege, and I know that my experiences aren’t universal. This is meant as an opinion piece. Please engage if you have anything to add! And correct me if I say anything offensive.
Let’s be real. The only thing that’s going to stop this pandemic is a full shut down. Initially, we started out great. People stayed home. Everyone who could work from home did. It sucked, but we did it. And no surprises, confirmed cases went down too. So what happened? Things started opening up, people started going out, and suddenly, more people started getting sick. However, something was different this time. People (mainly, our elected officials), pretended that this was alright. No restrictions were put in place (minus the mask mandates, which I think I want to touch on in another post, I have a whole lot to say about people who don’t wear their masks). There’s only one word for it: gaslighting.
And we continue to be gaslit by people in power. For college students, this means countless emails from our Universities about “resuming in person classes”, “moving into dorms” and the ever enigmatic “sunrise plans”. About half of the students I know are fully online, isolating, and honestly, struggling. The rest? They act like things are normal again. There’s a photo circulating from my University of a gigantic group of freshman gathered in the courtyard of one of the dorm complexes. Obviously, these students made a bad choice, but I think that the real “bad guy” here is the University. College students are college students. Suddenly, you put a group of young adults together who are itching to socialize, when really, the opportunity to get together should not have been raised at all. I paid $3,000 for my housing each semester my freshman and sophomore year. Opening dorms was a clear sign that the University cares more about that profit than the lives of students.
If it wasn’t already clear that the University exists to make a profit, resuming the Big Ten sports conferences should be a clear sign. Americans are obsessed with the idea of things returning to normal. But things can’t return to normal until people put in the effort to shut things down, and stop the spread of Covid.
Every college student I’ve interacted with this semester is more lonely, less productive, and overall less well than they would be during a normal semester. The University could do a lot of things to alleviate this; waive tuition, change grading standards, halt in person classes, etc. But apparently two months of online school in the spring was enough time to acclimate to this “new normal”.
Overall, college students are being destroyed by their Universities. We’re being sucked dry of our spirits, all in the pursuit of profit. At my school, people tell us that “things are getting better,” or, “the plan is proceeding as expected”, but rising cases of Covid on campus tell another story.
