Photo: Liz Willen

By his own account, Oscar Tendilla was a horrible middle school student, unmotivated, and indifferent. Last month, he became his family’s first college graduate. He now has plenty of career options, no debt, and a diploma from Cornell University.

Tendilla credits his turnaround to a high school network known as Pathways in Technology Early College High School that directly links students from historically underserved backgrounds to colleges and careers with paid internships and intensive mentoring. 

A student takes a class on astronomy while living in a van, balancing her Zoom-based coursework with her job on a goat farm. A recently minted literature Ph.D., unable to find work, becomes a nurse instead—and reflects on his new career as the hospitals are bracing for COVID. A professor cries onscreen, mourning the suicide of a student.

Students and professors share their personal stories of hope, isolation, and loss from a period of time already receding—with luck, for good. Whatever normalcy emerges this fall will be a “new” normal, chipped and splintered by the experiences of the last year and a half.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced almost every college or university to make do without a physical campus at some point in the last 15 months. Yet, many students and employees yearned to return, and most institutions anticipate resuming at least quasi-normal in-person operations this fall. 

But changes in how students learn and employees work will almost certainly compel college leaders to reassess the importance of the physical campus and the link between mission and place.