My Two-Cents: Post-Apocovidlypse Academia

I listened to a podcast (The Unintended Consequences of Working from Home, Freakonomics) the other day that strummed over the long term-effects of covid in the business world, and the potential it has to throw cities into an “urban doom loop" -- which I will sum up very shortly.

1. Companies realize working from home does work

2. They don’t need to spend a heavy dime on expensive inner-city real-estate

3. Come to the end of these leases, which won’t be for a couple of years+, they won’t renew their contracts

4. Real estate value goes down drastically

5. Property tax revenue from this real estate goes down in tandem

6. Cities have to cut programs, or increase other taxes and people move to suburbs

7. Who knows from here, cities die or adapt

Another thing discussed was the idea that things will never go back to normal. 

Though the switch to an online work structure was probably inevitable, the pandemic is really what propelled companies to try it out. Because they had to. And now that we’ve realized it can and does work (to a sense, there are pros and cons), the 5-day in-person work week and water-fountain conversations are a normality of the past. But I’m twenty and won’t be entering the workforce for a couple more years, since I plan to avoid adulthood and all real responsibilities for as long as possible by continuing in academia. So this discussion got me thinking about how covid might have a long-term impact on college and academia as we know it. 

I’ll start off by saying two things:

1. I have no quantitative evidence to support my presumptions. You will just have to trust that I’m really really smart.

2. I don’t think college will ever be the same again. It’s inevitable. And here’s why I think there are some shitty drawbacks to that –

I think we can draw a lot of parallels between how the pandemic affected the business world, and how it affected secondary education. After all, secondary education is a form of business -- my pile of student loans can speak to that one. Anyways -- I think a lot of courses will never return in person, especially generals. Why would they? There is "virtually" no incentive for that. We have systems set up for virtual education, and we realize they work satisfactorily. We have online classes, zoom lectures, and online assignments and exams that check the same boxes as in-person classes. And personally, I think zoom might have been my peak of learning; I found that watching zoom lectures by myself made it a lot easier to focus than in-class lectures where I could easily tune out or get distracted. But the one thing that's missing from online classes is interaction. 

Interaction is much more important than people realize. Though the learning post-covid might be up to par with its pre-covid norm, the interaction is DEFINITELY not. The sample size of people you met probably went down drastically – because you don’t really meet people in zoom classes. And that kind of sucks. Because I use to hear stories from older friends about how they met a good friend through a friend from a general class or something along those lines. 

To emphasize what I’m getting at through numbers –

-Say your sample size of people you meet in a semester is 200 people.

-Then, say you actually become friends with 10% of them – that’s 20 people

-Now say due to covid, you only met 50 people in a semester, and you only really liked 10% (carrying over the previous assumption)

-Now you now only really know five people

Let’s further this…

-Say, after your first semester of college (in-person situation) those 20 people each introduce you to two more people

-20*2 = 40 + the original 200 = 240 people

Vs

-5*2 = 10 + the original 50 = 60 people

The amount of people you’ve been acquainted with has now decreased by 75%. For every four people you knew before, now you only know one.

It’s important to realize that the quality of the friends you make and the people you know is much more meaningful than the quantity. However, to find people you really connect with, you often have to sift through people you don’t. When our sample sizes shrink, the number of people we acquaint ourselves with does in tandem. And this coincides with a decrease in the probability you'll bump into someone you might really like. That’s the hidden side of pretty much anything that’s shifted online: work, academia, you name it. And why I think in-person academia should always have its place, even if online looks pretty on paper. Interaction is invaluable, and it has no zoom link.

That's just my 2-cents though,

Kate ;)