The two cursed cohorts have reached college and they are struggling
In my two decades of teaching university courses, I’ve never seen more students have more struggles than in the last two years. That’s especially the case this current year. I have a suspicion as to why this is.
One can’t assume that every individual in any group is the same, but there are patterns and tendencies. In an earlier article, I offered a theory to understand generations by identifying major events occurring at individuals’ most impressionable ages of 5 to 17. Here is that article in full.
The last generation that I named in that article was the COVID-19 generation. The lockdowns and high levels of anxiety in 2020 and 2021 took a toll on many people in all age groups, but the pandemic probably had a greater effect on young people in their formative years. Using the concept that those formative ages are 5 to 17 years old, we would define the COVID-19 generation as people born between 2003 and 2015. Also in my article, I offered a look to the future.
We will see over the next two decades how these people respond to the pandemic’s aftereffects.
Drilling down further, there’s a microgeneration within the COVID-19 generation of people who entered high school in 2020 or 2021. Those people had their first year or two of high school disrupted by the pandemic. That would have affected them in various ways, including their relationship with education. In those highly formative and transitional years, these people had fewer opportunities to gain experience and skills in how to be engaged, dedicated students.
They’re Now Here
These missed years matter for this two-year COVID-19 microgeneration as they arrive in college. In contrast, students who graduated high school in 2020 and 2021 had a rough last two years of high school, but their transition to college courses online was less jarring. They were older and better able to handle the pandemic. Their transition to college was smoothed by the added wrinkle that colleges and universities were abundantly deferential to the incoming freshers as everyone desperately wanted to get back to “normal.” That incoming class was perhaps the most coddled ever. In 2020, everyone was floundering, and the freshers class of 2020 was no more lost than most of their professors.
In 2025, university sophomores and freshers are the students who probably received the greatest negative effects of the pandemic. They are the microgeneration who were born in 2006 and 2007. These student cohorts would have entered (remotely) high school in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. For many, that transition to that higher level would have been rough. These two cohorts graduated from high school in 2024 and 2025 and entered university those same years. They seem to be having a similarly rough transition to college.
In every year I’ve taught, there are students who have high levels of motivation and scholastic skills, there are students who have low levels of motivation and scholastic skills, and there are a large number in the middle. Of all the cohorts I’ve ever taught, the two cohorts who are now freshers and sophomores have the highest numbers of students who have low motivation and scholastic skills.
In every course I teach, I give deadlines for assignments and an absolute drop-dead deadline for all work to be submitted for the course. Every year, there have been one or two students who, in the last few days of the term, suddenly emerge to express great concern over their missing assignments and impending failure of the course. A typical message from these students is, “I’m sorry I haven’t been handing in assignments, is there any way I can pass the course?” These messages come to me with only a few days before the end of term, when the students hope that I will allow them to complete several weeks of work in several days.
The Cursed Cohort
For years, these sudden end-of-term emergencies used to happen once or twice a year. Now, they crop up four times a semester. The COVID-19 microgeneration has arrived, and they are less primed to cope with responsibility and more primed to seek exceptions from normal procedures. I suspect that during the pandemic they were trained to plead for more exemptions to deadlines and responsibilities because, during that exceptionally fraught time, they received them.
Disengagement is now the baseline for these cohorts. The last two years, I’ve seen the highest number ever of college students withdraw from courses. Some start the courses disengaged and lethargic, and then they just give up. Many of those who stay in the courses are also less enthused, less connected, and less dedicated than students in the past — even compared with students in the previous year.
I could rattle off a bunch of numbers of how many students missed deadlines, how many missed deadlines by a month or more, and so on, for the previous term. I could relate how several students contacted me about what more they could do to raise their grade after grades for the university were officially finalized and posted. “Hey, I know we lost the game yesterday, but could I have a few more at bats today?”
Suffice to say that in my 20-plus years of teaching, I’ve never seen such a high level of apathy, disconnect, or lack of responsibility. Students get the grades they earn, and the previous spring term I saw the lowest median grade in my teaching history. And it isn’t just me; most of my colleagues report the same.
I Worry about Students
I worry about some of these young people. I don’t blame social media, I don’t blame “wokeness” (whatever that is), and I don’t blame AI. I blame the pandemic and the failure of high schools to help students and society in general for not caring about education. These students are lethargic and apathetic but still expect to pass courses because grade school has taught them they can get away with it. I want to help them, but I can’t make them care.
Every individual is responsible for their actions, but no one acts within a vacuum — people act freely within the constraints their environment puts on them. The social environment we’ve created is not supportive for individuals of any age to excel intellectually. We especially don’t give young people enough support. We could do much better for them, which would be better for us all.
All in all, I respect and admire most young people for their perseverance in a difficult time of transition in life.