Lives were forever flipped upside down on March 13, 2020. What was initially announced as a short two-week break, transformed into a lockdown that spanned over a year and affected the lives of billions.

Of the countless number of people that were affected, students worldwide suffered a brunt of the impact, having their entire academic careers flipped upside down. As a result, many had to make do with the circumstances, and some dropped out of school or took a break to pursue other ventures.

In terms of the amount of students that “disappeared,” either dropping out or transferring to other schools elsewhere, the Cal State University system overall saw a noticeable drop in enrollment. Between the fall 2020 and fall 2022 semesters, 24,000 currently enrolled undergraduate students would drop out of the California State University system. Some of these students never got the opportunity to finish school, and this missed out on the opportunity to graduate and earn their degrees because of missing bits and pieces. This loss of students would also result in millions of dollars being lost as a result of missing admissions money. In the wake of this crisis, many have pointed towards the CSU system, shunning it for making the ends meet with struggling students due to various reasons, thus making them drop out.

Associate Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness, Heather Brown says that reasons behind this mass exodus of students isn’t just applicable not just in Sonoma State University, but in the CSU system as a whole. Financial factors, personal or family health hours, and academic difficulties are some examples of the myriad of differing reasons for why students have chosen to drop out. 

Brown mentions that, “during the pandemic, the main reasons for decline in enrollment here at SSU was lower new student enrollment, not a loss of current students. On our campus, retention rates actually increased during the pandemic, which means that more students stayed enrolled on our campus than before the pandemic.”

The impact on school life was also impossible to ignore. All in-person extracurriculars were postponed from March 2020-Aug. 2021, being all online just like classes. There were also students living in the residence halls during this time, but the numbers were low. However, there has been significant improvement since things started to reopen in the Fall 2021 semester. 

In regards to the re-opening process, Robert Eyler, the interim associate vice president for government and regional relations, says that the approach to reopening taken by SSU was one that was strategically planned, doing so by “using the safety protocols of the county, growing the percentage of in-person courses each semester, maintaining more online coursework at the upper division level, where students were most interested in having that mode, and reopening services and food venues as quickly as we could restaff.” 

For example, the percentage of in-person classes was 43%. By Spring 2023, that number shot up to 77%. Other noticeable changes to campus include more food venues being opened, as well as a decline in students.

Even with the end of the COVID vaccine mandate on March 2, people are still skeptical about if this new policy will actually help the student populations of SSU and other CSU schools bounce back to pre-pandemic levels.

Fourth year finance major Chris Strouse says that there won’t be that much of an uptick in student population in the aftermath of the mandate’s end. “Some students will possibly come as a result but I think the majority of students got vaccinated in order to attend a CSU and made it an incentive.”

“It is unlikely to change the gap significantly on its own,” states Natalie Kalogiannis, director of admissions, “some students may return, but that assumes they left primarily because of the vaccine mandate, which is unlikely to be the prime or only reason students stopped their academic journey.”