The Class of 2020 Would Like to Have a Word

They began their freshman year just a few months before Trump was elected and are graduating into a pandemic. Olin College of Engineering held its commencement two months early, on March 12, 2020, before sending students home.

Most generations alive today in the United States can point to moments of social upheaval that defined them, from the baby boomers shaped by the civil rights movement to the Gen Xers who lived through the AIDS epidemic and millennials who came of age in the shadow of 9/11. But what Gen Z has experienced crammed into the four years between 2016 and 2020 — world-reshaping event after world-reshaping event all magnified by the interconnectedness of the internet era — is in a class all its own.

The Class of 2020 began its college career just a few months before the election of Donald Trump stunned the entire world and upended American politics. It has witnessed shock after shock since: mass shootings in Parkland, El Paso, and Las Vegas; the family separation crisis at the border; widespread racist and anti-Semitic incidents; hurricanes, floods, and wildfires that have underscored the threat of climate change; the #MeToo reckoning; and what seems to be an unending culture war. Then, as they prepared to walk the stage, the coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt. End-of-college rituals suddenly became inaccessible as most of the country was ordered to stay at home, and whatever job prospects students had evaporated into thin air as the economy took an unprecedented nosedive.

“I’ve always had a hard time visualizing my future in general, and it’s harder now,” Mattia Carbonaro, a 22-year-old math major at Oregon State University, said. “I want to celebrate, but celebrating just makes me sad.”

The students still sounded a bit shell-shocked when recalling the outcome of the 2016 presidential election during the first half of their freshman year. As young people who grew up in the progressive, long-arc-of-history Obama era, the results made them question everything they thought they knew about how power works — and just as they were starting to figure out everything else, too.

“It’s still hard for me to figure out: Has it always been like this? Or was it that I was growing up and started to care more about politics?” Carbonaro asked. Raised in a conservative household, she started aligning with liberal causes in high school. Reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ issues were the areas she cared the most about, particularly after she came out as gay as a high school senior. The events of the past four years have only solidified her political identity and commitment to activism. “America’s health care system, or lack thereof, is absolutely insane,” she said. “Especially now, hearing about how other countries are handling this pandemic differently and not experiencing the mass death we are — so many places that have built-in safety nets that we don’t.”

The majority of Gen Zers are like her: decidedly to the left of their parents and grandparents, according to the Pew Research Center. Democrats already enjoy a 27% advantage among voters born between 1981 and 1996, and are expected to have an even stronger one among those born since. Many are fed up with the status quo and already jaded with electoral politics. For Sara Jacques, a graduating senior at Pennsylvania State University, the last four years in the Democratic Party have given her whiplash. After Hillary Clinton’s devastating loss in 2016, a historic number of women were elected to Congress in 2018. Then, this election season, a record number of female presidential candidates ran for the nomination. And yet somehow the party still ended up nominating an old, white, male centrist — one facing a sexual assault allegation that deeply troubles the 21-year-old. “There needs to be extreme structural change before I can believe in politics. That doesn’t mean I’m not voting, because I recognize that the only way to achieve that change is to be involved,” said Jacques, who supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the primary and used language familiar to those who follow the Massachusetts senator’s speeches.

Paola Nagovitch has never particularly trusted the political system, and the world post-2016 has cemented her doubts. “Whatever is happening right now is a result of the way the U.S. can’t reconcile with its actions, its legacy, its mistakes—whether you talk about the health care system, about police brutality. These are patterns of behavior and the country has not learned from them,” the 22-year-old said from her family’s home in San Germán, Puerto Rico, where she’s quarantining.

A journalism and political science student at New York University, she said the defining events of her college career were Hurricane Maria, which devastated the U.S. territory in 2017, and the protests that led to the ouster of Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló last summer. “Since Maria, I realized that I wanted all my work focused on Puerto Rico,” she said. “It has made me such a better journalist and brought focus to my work.”

Gen Z is well-known for its activism, particularly around the issue of climate change. But as University of Southern California student Connor Hudson said: “We can’t all be Malala.”

Instead, people like Hudson are trying to enact change at a smaller scale. The first stop for the 22-year-old business administration major was changing his career path. He pointed specifically at the reckoning around sexual harassment and violence that began in the fall of 2017 as a turning point. “I showed up at USC thinking I was going to work in entertainment. But over the course of four years, everything from #MeToo to all this political news happened,” he said. “I grew up without that much conflict in my life, but then my mom was diagnosed with cancer and my dad had a stroke. She passed recently, and he is in assisted living. It made me pay attention, and I want to do something that can have a meaningful impact on people’s lives.”

He now hopes to start Columbia Law School, where he has been admitted, this fall. “If that happens!” he added, contemplating the bleak possibility of further school shutdowns.

Diana Castillo, an Ithaca College graduating senior, has also changed her plans. The 22-year-old arrived in college with the goal of being a “traditional journalist” like the ones “you see in CNN and NBC.” But she’s leaving with a new perspective, one that she says has been influenced by the current news. “The summer of the family separation crisis was definitely a defining moment,” she said. “There’s an underlying understanding those conditions exist in detention centers, but when you see them and you hear them is very different.” Castillo is now more interested in using journalist tools to do advocacy, freeing herself from the constraints of mainstream media outlets. “There are certain political views that I have on human rights issues that I should not be expected to forget or bend on,” she said.

The Class of 2020 will not have the bookending to their college years they wished for, and that can be scary. “My commencement is going to be a 20-minute video online after what, half a million dollars spent on my education?” Nagovitch said. “You romanticize el regreso and you think about it all the time… But when it’s forced, it’s not what you thought it would be.”

Despite the pessimism that the pandemic has provoked, graduating seniors are also trying to use this opportunity to create change. Jacques, who majored in African American studies, is focused on doing everything she can to find a solutions-based approach to the way the pandemic has disproportionately impacted Black Americans. “It’s just a weird time, but it feels like an important time,” she said.

And if there’s something that the meme-savvy generation will do is take on the challenge of adulthood with humor. If she could go back in time, Carbonaro would give her freshman self some practical advice. “Strap in, it’s going to be a really long ride. Enjoy it while it lasts,” she said. “And invest in Zoom, because the stocks will be through the roof. If you do it at the right time, you won’t be worried about getting a job when you graduate.”

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