Instead, institutions moved forward.
“Basically, we got older,” Levine said, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute in January about The challenges of higher education.. “Pretty soon the people who were at home were no longer in college. It’s a relatively short number of years.”
There were innovations. In what we would call remote learning today, lectures expanded correspondence courses. In 1922, Penn State became the first institution to use radio for instruction. Female enrollment increased, particularly in nursing.
But there was little evidence of repair or recovery. Students who had seen their education disrupted by both World War I and the pandemic dwindled in numbers and changed their perspectives. They would become known as the lost generation: disillusioned, cynical, psychologically scarred, and searching for meaning in a world that had failed to make sense.
What prevented this loss from registering as a lasting crisis was scale. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, only about 5 percent of young Americans attended college. There were far fewer colleges and universities. And higher education was not yet central to economic and social life as it is today. When one cohort failed, institutions simply admitted the next. Replacement replaced recovery.
Still, the cultural effects were visible. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the lingering disillusionment of a generation scarred by war and disease. The Roaring Twenties, again Levine, were less a sign of healing than a counterreaction that would be followed, a decade later, by the Great Depression.
Levine does not romanticize the past. “Everything I’ve read makes it seem like the Spanish flu combined with World War I could have been a tougher job,” he said in an interview. “So many lives were lost, not just students but faculty and staff. Mental health resources were primitive.”
The parallels with the present are disturbing, but the differences may matter even more. Today, more than 60 percent of young adults attend college immediately or shortly after high school. Higher education has become a mass institution, deeply intertwined with economic mobility and social identity. And Covid not only interrupted schooling; imposed prolonged social isolation at a formative stage of adolescent and young adult development. Levine notes that it is impossible to separate the effects of the pandemic from the rise of smartphones and social media, which were already reshaping the way young people relate to each other.
The decline in enrollment after Covid echoes that of the Spanish flu era. But replacement may no longer be a viable strategy. When higher education serves a small elite, institutions can quietly absorb the losses. When it serves a majority, the consequences of disruption are broader, more visible and more difficult to overcome.
The lesson of the Spanish flu is not that young people inevitably recover. The thing is that the institutions waited. A century ago, that carried limited costs. Today, with a much older and more psychologically vulnerable young adult population, the price can be much higher.
This story about how spanish flu affected universities was prepared by The Hechinger Reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Enroll in Test points and others Hechinger Newsletters.
