COVID’s Reckoning is Coming to College This Fall

Colleges, brace yourself: the class of 2024 is going to be unlike anything we’ve seen previously. 

These students who will be matriculating in the fall are the result of a highly disrupted and unusual high school experience. They were freshmen when the pandemic started, and experienced some of their most formative years without the benefit of in-person instruction or social interaction with their classmates. 

Ensuring their success in college — and in the real world — will be the responsibility of both the students and their institutions. 

We’ve long known that coming out of the pandemic, students were suffering. These students experienced social isolation, anxiety, and fear during their formative years. They lived with an existential stress that can define a generation. 

From a development standpoint, these students lost the chance at in-person learning during a formidable period of their education. Things that you and I might take for granted — like the social skills learned passively (and sometimes unknowingly) from watching our educators — didn’t exist for these students. Their development fell behind, both academically and socially.

Now we’re seeing the consequences. 

Supporting A Challenging Transition

Pandemic-era students are experiencing more difficulty transitioning to college than previous generations of learners. They are struggling to catch up academically, but they’re also struggling socially. They’re spending less time with friends than they once did, and some companies that hire them now offer business etiquette courses once they arrive.

But rather than trying to supplant their high school education, colleges should help students improve the soft skills they lost out on, providing real-world, experience-based learning from day one. 

Colleges must also focus on and demonstrate their return on investment for education-weary students. For this next generation of learners, perhaps the most critical value colleges can offer is going to be the life and professional skills they lost out on during the pandemic. 

From the moment students arrive on our campuses, as educators, we need to push this new generation of learners to catch up on the life skills that they lost out on — which happen to be the same skills that are going to help them succeed in the real world. These skills will help our future graduates stand out in the job market and adapt to unforeseeable changes they’ll encounter during their careers.

Getting students' hard skills up to standard is the easy part. A 2022 High Point University survey found that a majority of executives, when asked a series of questions about which is easier to develop – life skills or technical skills – said technical skills are easier to develop. Seventy-five percent of executives said it is easier to develop an employee’s technical skills than personal initiative, and 70 percent said it’s much easier to develop an employee’s technical skills than it is to develop their coachability.

Especially as things with artificial intelligence continue to shake up the economic landscape, ensuring that our students are prepared to become problem solvers and collaborators is more important than ever. Freshmen need to be encouraged to seek out opportunities to work with their peers and professors, in groups and on teams, and regain some of the in-person time that can be so valuable.

Compressing Time

At the college where I serve as president, we offer experiences to students earlier. We’ve set up our career advisors to work with students more holistically, helping them work through what the right career path is, and which majors they should consider. Our career advisors help connect students to clubs, mentors, and opportunities that can help them to gain the right experience and fill in any gaps. 

As I tell the students in my first-year seminar: “How you change is how you succeed.” 

Both colleges and students need a change. Every generation has its unique challenges and experiences; disruption and change are the only constant. Our job is to recognize this moment as an opportunity for both future freshmen and our institutions to grow.

The silver lining is that the pandemic imbued these students with a new degree of resiliency. Colleges now have to ask the tough question about whether they have the same resilience and adaptability. Are we scanning for the next disruption with an anticipatory mindset? Are we willing to change again? 

Ensuring the success of the class of 2028 is going to require deep reflection and purpose. High school seniors need to understand that they’re starting at a deficit, and they must choose a school that can teach them not only about the latest technologies and philosophies, but the key life skills that will prepare them for any career they decide to enter. They need to find mentors and success coaches who can help them understand their knowledge gaps — and it will be our job to help make these connections. 

It is no secret that the freshmen who will start college in the fall were hit hard by the COVID-19 lockdown. University administrators, faculty, and staff should expect this incoming class of freshmen to be different from others in the past and need extra support.

We should do everything we can to help them successfully navigate this transition, starting with teaching them the life skills they missed out on developing but that employers clearly say are needed. These are more important than ever in the complex, post-COVID world.