The class of 2024 is getting a rough start into adulthood.
These young adults have suffered through "one of the most disruptive and unconventional college experiences in modern history," Axios reported, dubbing the class of 2024 as the "bummer generation."
"What has been resonating with me has been the consistent history-making experiences we've had since graduating high school," JoJo Holm, a senior at Northwestern University, told Axios.
The report pointed out that many of these students had their high school experience cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced kids to attend classes online, canceled proms and introduced us to socially distanced "drive-by" graduations, with diplomas handed through car windows.
For those students who were just starting college when COVID-19 hit, they were sent home abruptly when campuses closed as the virus spread, and they completely classes remotely and in isolation. Even when campuses reopened, the "typical" experience was changed by COVID-19 restrictions and continued pandemic-related constraints.
Now, graduation ceremonies at colleges across the U.S. are being canceled or at least threatened as protests against Israel's war in Gaza disrupt the end of the semester on multiple campuses.
Grant Oh, a senior at the University of Southern California, which has called off its main commencement ceremony, told The Associated Press his only graduation ceremony was in middle school.
"It's crazy because I remember starting freshman year with the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which came after senior year of high school when the Black Lives Matter protests were happening and COVID, and xenophobia," he said. "It feels definitely surreal. It still shocks me that we live in a world that is so fired up and so willing to tear itself apart."
On top of missed milestones, this particular group of students has suffered from higher rates of anxiety and depression. According to a study published in the journal PLOS One, more than 80% of first-year college students in 2020 and 2021 said the pandemic increased their feelings of loneliness, depression and anxiety. The study noted that the COVID-19 pandemic created an additional source of stressors to an already challenging landscape of college transition.
"I'm really desensitized to it," Chloe Paravicini, a senior at Vanderbilt University, told Axios. "It feels like every year has not been a normal year since 2020."
Adding insult to injury, these students have had to live with the daily influence of social media, which "amplifies the world's wrongs like never before" and negativity spreads faster and wider than positive posts, the AP reported.
"Gen Z, they tend to be much more pessimistic than Millennials," Jean Twenge, a psychologist and professor at San Diego State University, told the AP. "The question going forward is do they take this pessimism and turn it into concrete action and change, or do they turn it into annihilation and chaos?"