Three years after the pandemic’s peak, its lingering effects continue to impede the full revival of student organizations — a vital factor underpinning retention, graduation, and belonging.
When Covid-19 shut down campuses in March 2020 and clubs moved online, colleges reported sharp drops in participation as institutions and students went into survival mode. Even as public-health restrictions receded and students returned to campuses, however, the fabric that kept the clubs operating and smoothly passing the torch from year to year remained frayed.
Faced with the challenge of rebuilding what was once the beating heart of campus involvement, some colleges are rethinking their approaches to engagement in big ways. The cost of student disconnection is too high to ignore.
Based on conversations with over a dozen experts in student affairs and engagement, here’s an overview of how clubs fell apart during the pandemic, why it matters, and what some colleges are doing about it.
Covid restrictions led many clubs to collapse.
At Webster University’s main campus, in a suburb of St. Louis, club membership dropped to levels that Jennifer Stewart, director of student engagement, had never seen before. While the university tried to create online involvement fairs and alternative engagement opportunities for its 3,500 students, Webster still lost about 25 percent of its student organizations during the pandemic.
Ohio State University was also feeling the effects. The campus of over 60,000 in Columbus is known for a “strong culture of student involvement,” according to Matt Couch, an associate dean of students. But that culture wasn’t immune from Covid-era shutdowns.
Before the pandemic, Ohio State had over 1,400 student organizations. Couch estimated that the number dropped below 1,300 amid the pandemic. An annual survey conducted each January at Ohio State confirmed the damage: Fifty-nine percent of undergraduates reported that they were involved in at least one organization in 2019. By January 2023, that number had dropped to 50 percent.
Those numbers don’t tell the full story, either: At both Webster and Ohio State, many groups that remained registered were effectively ghost clubs, with no active members.
During the first academic year of the pandemic era, Couch said Ohio State tried to fill the void with a program that organized peer-facilitated meetings of small groups. “In the absence of our full might of our student-organization offerings, we were essentially creating student organizations,” Couch said. “We just weren’t connecting with our existing groups.”
Student-led groups have built-in hurdles to sustaining membership. Leaders eventually graduate and leave organizations, or participants may quit clubs to get jobs. But Covid wreaked havoc on that already delicate structure.
“A lot of the groups were not active at a certain time, so they weren’t then able to recruit the younger students, the freshmen, to grow through the organization,” said Danielle McDonald, associate vice president and dean of students at the University of South Florida. The inactivity, she added, hampered natural transitions and put organizations’ health in jeopardy. “That was what created some issues over the past couple of years.”
Students didn’t have the energy to engage during the pandemic.
Many students have linked their lack of club participation to online-learning burnout. They were too tired after a day of Zoom classes to attend more virtual meetings. They didn’t have the mental capacity to prioritize extracurriculars as the pandemic disrupted their lives.
That’s how Jalalah Muhammad felt when she started at Webster in the fall of 2020. A self-described introvert, Muhammad didn’t have the energy to get involved on campus. Nearly empty Zoom rooms, where the only thing to do was talk, were especially intimidating. And if she did decide to join a virtual event, she didn’t feel like she was truly “present.”
“It was just kind of mentally hard,” Muhammad, now a senior, said. “It was like a little mental block, cause you were like, ‘Maybe I should get involved,’ but it was like, ‘I’m still here by myself, still not able to do a true connection.’”
According to the 2021 National Student Survey of Engagement, 55 percent of first-year students had “substantial increases” in depression, hopelessness, or loneliness because of Covid. The survey also found that 18- to 24-year-old undergraduates in particular struggled with increased concerns about their ability to socialize.
Those students missed experiences starting in high school that typically act as a “natural springboard” into campus involvement, said Laura A. Dean, a professor of college-student-affairs administration at the University of Georgia. Typically, “they’re doing more and more and more in high school, very involved, very engaged,” she said, “and boom, three months later, they’re ready to hit the ground running in that same way in college.”
When that progression was hindered, Dean said, those students entered college without the self-esteem and relationship skills that adolescents normally develop. “When you think about a group of students who didn’t have that,” she said, “ I think none of us knew what to do.”
Reviving defunct and dormant clubs is still a challenge.
Today, even though pandemic disruptions are in the past, the problems have persisted. For some students, disengagement has become a habit.
For example, student clubs need leaders to function. Many students never learned how to lead.
“They weren’t transitioned as positional leaders of their organizations in the same way that the predecessors were,” said Couch, of Ohio State, “so a lot of the naturally occurring officer transitions and just the observations that members make before they decided to take on leadership roles was interrupted.”
Stewart, of Webster, said there is a dearth of students with the confidence and agency to take on leadership roles, which she called the “missing piece” to campus life after Covid. She now finds herself coaxing younger students into accepting leadership positions, or coaching them through roles in a way she didn’t have to before the pandemic.
That was Emerald DuBose’s experience at Webster. She recalls being “voluntold” by an administrator to take on a leadership role in the university’s Association for African American Collegians chapter, even though she was a sophomore. DuBose, now a junior, reluctantly accepted.
DuBose and the rest of the club’s leadership board struggled to figure out the organization’s structure and recruitment methods. They spent much of the 2022-23 academic year trying to stabilize the club and find their footing. Now, as president of the group, DuBose said the organization is still in the rebuilding phase.
“It’s kind of been like pulling teeth trying to get students back involved,” she said.
Rebuilding seemed to be the case at most of the colleges whose representatives spoke with The Chronicle last fall. DuBose and her group, for example, spent the fall semester focused on improving event attendance and, for the first time in a few semesters, managed to attract more students. Membership and club numbers may be rebounding, but it won’t be easy to gain back all that’s been lost.
For colleges, resurrecting campus life isn’t optional.
The benefits of student engagement are well documented, said Ernest T. Pascarella, an emeritus professor of higher education at the University of Iowa, who spent over 30 years researching what works in higher education.
Over the course of 5,000 analyzed studies and three volumes of How College Affects Students, Pascarella found one major effect that sticks out above the rest: “The conclusion,” he said, “is that the one crucial thing that happens that leads to benefiting from college in all sorts of ways, is how much you get engaged.” (Pascarella, 79, died on Tuesday.)
Engagement helps students succeed academically, develop hard and soft skills, and improve physical and mental well-being.
The stakes feel especially high for some colleges — such as Valencia College, a two-year institution with campuses across south-central Florida. Josh Austin, director of student development, said student organizations are an essential “sticky factor” because the college does not offer a residential experience. By forging campus connections outside of the classroom, clubs encourage students to stay enrolled and graduate, added Lesley Frederick, the college’s vice president for student affairs.
“Creating these opportunities through student clubs and organizations ... and finding ways to create that sticky campus where students feel engaged, supported, connected, and safe, I think, are really paramount for us as we continue to serve these students that were so isolated for a good deal of time during their high school experience,” Frederick said.
Student organizations create environments that help students feel welcome, make connections, and build networks, said Peter Felten, executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, at Elon University. Felten is also assistant provost for teaching and learning.
“We might have images of students planning drinking games and other things,” Felten said, “but when you really dig into what happens in many of the organizations, students develop skills to relate to people who are different from them. They develop project-management and life skills. They develop leadership skills.”
Colleges are shifting their approach to student engagement.
The need for an overhaul became clear even before Covid, as a result of shrinking institutional budgets, changing habits among students, competition for students’ time, and increasing staff turnover in student-affairs offices. The pandemic exacerbated where institutions were already falling short.
“Pre-pandemic, it was ‘pizza and T-shirts usually get it done for you,’” said Austin, of Valencia. “Now, there has to be a lot more intentionality with how you connect with students.”
Part of the challenge, administrators said, is that many students not only lack an understanding of why engagement matters; they also seem more discerning with their time post-pandemic.
“I think that it is more important for students to hear the ‘why,’ beyond just ‘this is fun, and you meet more friends,’” Frederick says. “Those are important, don’t get me wrong. But also I think helping them understand the other value that may not be as obvious for engaging is a really important piece that students are looking for.”
How administrators define who is engaged, and what engagement looks like, could open the door for more participation. That may involve casting a wider net to show students different pathways into involvement, or rethinking the time commitment of student-leadership positions.
“I think the whole engagement question, we often look at too narrowly, in terms of a very traditional member-and-leader in traditional student orgs,” said Dean, the University of Georgia professor. “And that’s true for a lot of our students, but it’s not true for all of our students.”
At Ohio State, Couch said his division is trying several tactics to help groups rebuild institutional knowledge, including revamped faculty-adviser and student-leadership training, as well as a new peer-to-peer advising program to help existing organizations and students searching for engagement opportunities.
Austin and Frederick said Valencia College is working to lift participation by reducing basic-needs barriers — such as food or housing insecurity, mental-health issues, and financial need — to ensure students can get involved in the first place.
The full ramifications of the pandemic on the college experience won’t be known for some time. But student engagement has been pushed in a new direction — one that might not rely as heavily on pizza and prizes.
