Covid-19 killed college club recruitment and retention: A Reflection

This article referenced was originally published in the North Texas Daily on Apr 7, 2023. Click here to view it.

In April of 2023, I made my editorial debut in the North Texas Daily, UNT’s campus newspaper. The piece was meant to examine how the Covid pandemic impacted student organizations. As someone who began their higher education journey at the height of the pandemic’s fury, I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between academia and pandemic. The college experience we were promised was all but present during the days of Covid. My higher ed passion came of age with the then-novel coronavirus, and I have always felt that my experiences existing on a campus during the early days of post-lockdown will affect my perspective throughout my career.

With this as the case, it made sense launch my short-lived op-ed columnist career with a piece on Covid’s affect on college campuses. The piece was written, published and even landed a spot in the Daily’s print edition – back cover, below the fold, for your information. I even had the piece on display at the Society of Professional Journalists event featuring New York Time’s Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury. She and I talked about how exciting it was to see your first byline, to hold your first printed story. Not many people have the NYT opinion editors put eyes on their first editorial. In the moment, this was incredible. Today, it’s a mixed bag.

The story was good, but could it have been better? It was in print, on display and lives on the internet forever? This was my big break, did I stick the landing? A year later, and I believe it’s time to revisit Covid-19 killed college club recruitment and retention.

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In our post-quarantine world, clubs are far less important to the college experience. What was once a right of passage for college students – joining a club or organization, maybe even founding your own – is now seen as a waste of time.

During the pandemic, most people realized their time is worth more than they had previously thought, which effectively killed college club retention and recruitment. COVID-19 set into motion events that forever impacted the workplace. Working from home allowed people more time to be around those they love instead of spending time commuting and partaking in office rituals like chats about nothing around the water cooler.

The pandemic also saw the dawn of The Great Resignation – the mass resignation of people from jobs due to increased cost of living or hostile work environments.

College organizations weren’t immune to the cultural shift either. Students, too, realized their time is expensive and important. Why sit in a meeting every Tuesday in BLB 180 from 7 to 8 when they could be working? Hanging out with friends? Doing literally anything else?

The key here is the altruistic nature of college organizations – for them to function, students must volunteer their time. COVID taught us that our time is not something to be taken for granted. Now, we are far more intentional with how we use it.

College organizations give students that feeling of being plugged into campus and connected to others. However, in the post-pandemic world, students don’t have to leave their room to be involved. Services like Zoom make it possible to host meetings from anywhere. Another software that blew up over the pandemic is Canva. Canva allows anyone to be a graphic designer, so when it comes to advertising your club, you don’t need to walk around campus – all you need is an Instagram and a Canva account.

Creating connections on campus no longer relies on in-person meetings and word-of-mouth recruitment. These days, you can find a club on Instagram, go to its meeting on Zoom, run for office and be elected via Google Forms. You can belong to a community of people you have never met.

COVID also forced us to live in a world where connections were few and far between. The pandemic forced many younger college students to spend their later teen years speaking only to their immediate family in person. Maybe a delivery person here, a neighbor there, but the last few years have been lonely. We survived two years without being part of something bigger than ourselves, so why start now?

Despite all this, one kind of organization continues to thrive in the world post-COVID – identity-based groups. Groups like the Black Student Union, the Latinx-Hispanic Student Union and the Pride Alliance still see high numbers of engagement. They host huge events and give hundreds of students a family on campus.

This brings us to the third and final epiphany we had during COVID. Our identity matters. Who we are matters.

Summer 2020 will be remembered as a time of civil unrest in the nation. The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked massive outrage, and even during a lockdown, people flooded the streets across the nation to protest.

Anti-Asian hate was up during COVID, too. Disenfranchised communities were under attack, and as Generation Z entered our formative college years amongst this disarray, we became vocal.

We are loudly opposed to that which we disagree with. We don’t sit idly by when injustice occurs. We aren’t bystanders — we stand up. Groups intended for students who are Black, Latinx, Asian, Native American, LGBTQ+ and more allow students to be a part of something bigger than themselves and stand up for what they believe in.

With the looming threat of the Texas state government outlawing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on campus, the future of college organizations remains unknown. One thing is certain, though — the world of 2019, which we look at through rose-tinted glasses and blissful nostalgia, is no more.

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing though. Campus isn’t worse, just different. Hopefully, one day, like a phoenix from the ashes, we will see college clubs return as a keystone of the undergrad experience.

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So, there it is. My first piece. But how does it hold up?

For starters, I stand by my idea that people recognized the importance of time, money and identity during Covid. Gen Z especially has made identity the center of many of their ideas and ideals, and rightfully so. A world where more people are aware of and proud of who they are is a stronger world. Putting aside the identity component, our existence at the crossroad of the time and money epiphanies is fascinating. My original argument was that people recognized the importance of their money, thus wanting to spend more time making it, and people recognized the importance of their time, thus wanting to spend more time enjoying it. However, this Business Insider article illustrates how priorities change over time. In the battle of time well spent vs. money to spend, many of us are more likely to opt for the latter. Our world is expensive, and when looking for a job, people are sooner to examine the salary than the actual job description. We seem more likely to take a job that makes them richer and unhappier – and what’s new about that? As a wise philosopher once said, “Work sucks, I know.”

So perhaps my initial idea that everyone is spending more time frolicking through daisy fields with pockets lined with gold was a bit ambitious. Perhaps, too, it was ambitious to correlate the rise of discrimination and advocacy group like BLM with the rise in popularity of identity-based groups on campuses. However, I stand by that take. To me, it’s undeniable to associate the growing popularity in armchair advocacy with higher headcounts in identity-based clubs.

Overall, I can’t say I’m too displeased with my work. Obviously, as times change so too will the narrative around colleges and their post-covid recovery. Even as I am less and less involved with the inner-circle of campus involvement, I can tell club numbers are healing. People seem genuinely interested in finding a sense of belonging on campus. Clubs on campus were never going to go away, they’re an inherent part of what makes college such a special and unique experience. As author and columnist Ron Lieber writes, college is a time for students to have their minds blown and grown. Student must learn new things and expand their mindsets, and we can’t expect this to occur exclusively in the classroom. While I attribute much of my growth to professors, so too do I attribute it to peers and mentors whom I never would have connected with if it weren’t for a club.

So, like a phoenix from the ashes, college club’s have returned to their place as a keystone of the undergrad experience, just as a younger Ethan wrote. Perhaps next time we’ll dive a bit deeper into the nitty-gritty of this article, but for now, I’m happy with what I wrote and looking forward to what lies ahead.