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https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-fun-covid-pandemic-anxiety-ea992cee?mod=hp_lead_pos8

They Entered College in Isolation and Leave in Protest:

The Class That Missed Out on Fun
The pandemic left many students anxious and lonely, still choosing to go to class online, watch games on their phones and eat meals in their rooms. ‘We’ve never had a calm time when we can just focus on being kids.’

Columbia’s class of 2024 missed high school graduations and university orientation. Their freshman year passed in a haze of masks, Zoom classes and isolation.

Four years later, not much has changed. Thanks to the Gaza protests, crowds are again being dispersed, classes have gone remote and students are wearing masks—this time to hide their identities at demonstrations. Graduation ceremonies might be canceled.

“We’ve never had a calm time when we can just focus on being kids,” said Tejasri Vijayakumar, a senior and student body president of Columbia College at Columbia University. “You talk to people in generations above us about college and they said you could just gather in spaces and do whatever you want and no one would stop you, that’s not really true anymore.”

The political polarization on college campuses across the country this spring bookends a four-year span defined by anxiety.

College students today are lonelier, less resilient and more disengaged than their predecessors, research shows. The university communities they populate are socially fragmented, diminished and less vibrant. The pandemic bruised the psyche of a generation. The politics seared it.

In response, schools are beefing up their mental-health offerings and urging students to engage in clubs and activities. But administrators say they can coax them only so far, and are starting to wonder whether college life as previous generations knew it—including packed classrooms, keg parties and evening meetups—may be permanently changed.

“We may never be back to a more engaged time just because of how generations learn from each other,” said Nathan Thomas, vice president of student affairs at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. “This may be the new normal, there may be no real return to the past.”