Clockwise from top left: Ben Fagell, Cam Medrano, Erin Burnett, Sophie Boyce, Natalie Wu, Isabel Funk, Didi Jin and Maxine Giller.
Photographers: Danielle Towers, Clyde Nichols, Sydney J. Cohn, Gracie Hagen, William Casey, Chloe Sarmiento, Katie Park and Fiona Schade for Bloomberg Businessweek
The Class of 2024 Gets Ready for the Real World
The students graduating this spring entered college at a profoundly weird time. The vibes are still a little strange.
Freshman year of college is supposed to be a new beginning. But for the class of 2024, the experience was more of the horrible same. They started school about a half-year into the pandemic, a time of pervasive anxiety that was only heightened for teenagers about to begin one of life’s big transitions. Some weren’t even initially allowed on campus; those who were had to deal with severe Covid-19 restrictions.
I met more than 80 of these students in the summer of 2019, when they were rising high school seniors attending a summer journalism program where I teach on the campus of Northwestern University. I wanted to know what college had been like for them. How was the pandemic still affecting their experience? So last month, I asked a handful to record themselves answering questions about Covid, college, debt, artificial intelligence and how they see their professional lives shaping up. Their answers follow in edited excerpts.