The Effect of COVID-19 On College Student Experience – Media Analysis

• Callie Miller, Anthropology, University of Delaware

• Jennifer Trivedi, Anthropology, University of Delaware

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global disaster that affects a range of communities in a multitude of ways around the world, even beyond the initial moments of illness and instability. In particular, exploring the unique experiences and problems college students faced in the initial crisis of this disaster is important to better understand not only the entirety of the disaster itself, but also its potential ongoing effects that students and former students still face today. College communities typically saw a major change from their previous functionality which upended student experience in a way that needs further examination, which is the goal of this project. This work captures a long-term perspective of COVID-19 impacts on college students across the United States by drawing from student newspapers at community colleges, public universities, and private universities in March 2020, 2021, and 2022.

For this research, the United States was broken up into four regions: The West, Midwest, Northeast, and South. Schools across the United States were stratified by economic type, either community colleges, public universities, or private universities. Universities were then investigated on whether or not they had a student run newspaper, with schools not having an equivalent being removed from the list. Using a random number generator, one of each school type was selected from each region, creating a list of twelve schools from which data on student experience from the 2020 to 2022 timeframe was pulled. All of these articles were then organized and filed. The scope of this defining, stratifying, and sorting was the basis of the Summer Scholars aspect of this project, with the analysis and paper writing being continued into the fall and spring of the coming academic year.