Instead, institutions moved on.
“We’re basically out of this situation,” Levine told the American Enterprise Institute in January about the challenges facing higher education. “Soon, those who are at home are no longer in college. It’s a relatively short few years.”
There are some innovations. In what we now call distance learning, universities expanded correspondence courses. In 1922, Pennsylvania State University became the first institution to use radio for instruction. Female enrollment has increased, especially in nursing.
But there is little evidence of restoration or restoration. The number of students whose studies were interrupted by the First World War and the coronavirus pandemic decreased, and attitudes changed. They have been called a lost generation: disillusioned, cynical, psychologically scarred, searching for meaning in a meaningless world.
What prevents this loss from becoming a lasting crisis is scale. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, only about 5% of young Americans attended college. There are far fewer colleges and universities. Higher education was not yet as central to economic and social life as it is today. When one group of people underperforms, institutions simply accommodate another group. Replacement replaces restoration.
Still, the cultural influence is evident. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald documented the lingering disillusionment of a generation shaped by war and disease. Levine believes that the Roaring Twenties were less a sign of healing than a reaction to the Great Depression that followed a decade later.
Levine doesn’t romanticize the past. “Everything I read made me think that the Spanish flu combined with World War I would have been a much tougher battle,” he said in an interview. “A lot of people lost their lives — not just students, but faculty and staff. Mental health resources are primitive.”
The similarities to the present are troubling, but the differences may be more important. Today, more than 60% of young people enter college immediately or shortly after graduating from high school. Higher education has become a mass institution, deeply intertwined with economic mobility and social identity. The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted more than just schooling; It creates chronic social isolation during the formative years of adolescents and young adults. Levin noted that it’s impossible to separate the impact of the pandemic from the rise of smartphones and social media, which are already reshaping relationships among young people.
Post-COVID enrollment declines echo those of the Spanish Flu era. But substitution may no longer be a viable strategy. When higher education serves an elite few, institutions can quietly absorb losses. When it serves the most people, the consequences of disruption are broader, more obvious, and more difficult to transcend.
The lesson of the Spanish Flu was not that young people inevitably rebound. It is these institutions that endure by waiting. A century ago, this cost was limited. Today, with a growing youth population and increasing psychological vulnerabilities, the costs are likely to be even higher.
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