First-Year College Students’ Meaning Making of the Pandemic’s Impacts on Their Academics

The deep reverberations that the COVID-19 pandemic had on adolescents will continue to resonate with them as they age and go to college. In this study, we explore how 70 first year college students make meaning of COVID-19’s impacts on their academic lives as they begin their post-secondary education. Based in a phenomenological approach to ecosystems theory, we interviewed students as they began college to ask about what their academics in high school were like, how they were experiencing the transition to college, and connections they did or did not draw between the two. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyze the interview data, producing five themes: schools and teachers responded well given the circumstances, but laid groundwork for academic struggles into the future; mental and emotional challenges related to the early pandemic affected learning and learning strategies; for some, academic struggles motivated personal growth; varied impacts meant greater challenges in the transition to college; and experiences informed thinking about future trajectories. These results demonstrate the need to attend not simply to static or quantitative measures of the pandemic’s impact on young people’s lives, but how they make meaning and respond as they develop.