Exhausted but Optimistic: a Portrait of This Year’s Incoming Freshmen

Members of the high school Class of 2021 — whose entire senior year was marred by a global pandemic — are mentally exhausted but optimistic about their first year of college, according to new data on students entering college this fall.

That’s just one of the insights in the data from the annual Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement, conducted by the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University at Bloomington. Between May and August 20, the survey had more than 40,000 respondents who recently completed high school and were entering bachelor’s degree-granting colleges in the fall of 2021.

The survey, which closes in mid-September, includes pandemic-related questions to capture how Covid altered students’ lives and fueled concerns about their future, health and safety, and ability to socialize. As classes get underway at colleges across the nation, the data provide insight about students’ hopes for their first year of college and the impact Covid has had on their mental health.

More than half of the students reported a substantial increase in mental/emotional exhaustion as a result of the pandemic. But at the same time, 47 percent were “very optimistic” that their first-year of college would be a success.

Here’s more on what the survey says about how the pandemic has affected first-year students: