The Ivory Tower Lost: How College Students Respond Differently than the General Public to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In the United States, the country with the highest confirmed COVID-19 infection cases, a nationwide social distancing protocol has been implemented by the President. Following the closure of the University of Washington on March 7th, more than 1000 colleges and universities in the United States have cancelled in-person classes and campus activities, impacting millions of students. This paper aims to discover the social implications of this unprecedented disruption in our interactive society regarding both the general public and higher education populations by mining people's opinions on social media. We discover several topics embedded in a large number of COVID-19 tweets that represent the most central issues related to the pandemic, which are of great concerns for both college students and the general public. Moreover, we find significant differences between these two groups of Twitter users with respect to the sentiments they expressed towards the COVID-19 issues. To our best knowledge, this is the first social media-based study which focuses on the college student community's demographics and responses to prevalent social issues during a major crisis.