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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
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. Since then, it has witnessed shock after shock: 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…
