When Laurie Burstein-Maxwell’s son Dan told her he felt like something was wrong, she understood why he seemed to be distancing from his friends. Before his depression, his mom said, the high school senior spent all his free time out and about in Radnor, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. In…

Amanda Fowler had been trying to do college the right way. During her first months at the University at Albany in 2019, the 18-year-old threw herself into parties that reminded her of those she’d seen on social media—ones that promised to secure her the most desirable college experience. As she…

Alicia Floyd is still on the clock when she sits down to record. Leaning forward, she films herself from the shoulders up, dressed in a black scrub top, with the pale, empty walls of a hospital call room behind her. “Briefly,” she recounts, “my story is that I matriculated in…

From the messages they’d exchanged before move-in day, Nichole K., now 24, never suspected that her relationship with her newly-assigned college roommate would be anything other than cordial. The two incoming members of the University of Delaware’s class of 2020 didn’t seem to have much in common, Nichole said, but…

The pandemic got Sylvia Mahjabeen thinking about her education again. She had spent the last decade cycling through jobs, in industries like retail and fast food, and left her latest gig, packing for Amazon, when lockdown began. The longtime Queens resident from Bangladesh decided to give school another shot. Nearly…

The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s student newspaper, was the first to break the story. Computer science professor Walter Lasecki had faced four allegations of sexual misconduct. Not only was the university aware of the allegations, but its investigation determined his behavior did not violate the school’s harassment policy.…

I went to a birthday party this August, a few weeks before school started again in-person for the first time since March, 2020. A rising senior, I realized that, with the exception of a few close friends, I probably wouldn’t know most of the people at the party, or at…

When she turns her camera on, Judi Alperin King, Ph.D., appears on Zoom, revealing a bare backdrop behind her, and the muffled but familiar noise of construction rumbling in the background. She quickly notes that the Wily Network, a safety net organization that supports college students’ basic needs, is expanding…

When the pandemic struck midway through the second semester of her sophomore year at college, 19-year-old Jane flew thousands of miles home to California and found herself almost entirely without the activities or responsibilities that she’d devoted herself to before. “I went home, and all of a sudden, I had…