Why uni students are still hanging out with school mates

Ms Jones stayed in touch with her local friends during the lockdown, catching up for games nights on Zoom or FaceTime, or one on one for outdoor exercise on the northern beaches walking tracks.

Georgia Barr from Fairlight, near Manly, is a first-year finance and psychology student at the University of Sydney who has remained close to her friends from primary and secondary school, describing it as “a north shore bubble”.

“It’s pretty devastating I’m never going to get the true uni experience,” Ms Barr said. “I hear my sisters and mum rave about uni games and skipping lectures to go to the pub, but even when I have gone onto campus, it’s ghostly, riddled with COVID-safe signs and precautions such as chairs blocked off – not really creating an enticing environment where people want to mingle anyway.”

Ms Barr said students often opted for online classes, even when given the choice because it was hard to muster the enthusiasm to commute for two hours to a half-empty campus. Some of her peers had organised their timetables to be in classes with their existing friends, “making them less likely to leave their comfort zone and meet new people”.

Ms Barr has made more friends at her job than at university, and earlier in the year she cut down on her course load so she could work more. She says she has heard nothing from the university about classes resuming after lockdown so presumes “it’s 100 per cent online for the foreseeable future”.

It’s even harder for young people who found their school friendship groups had fallen apart or who have moved to another city for university.

Denzil Noack, 20, a second-year student in exercise science at the University of Sydney, moved from Wagga Wagga and has found it hard to make new friends in the city because of the restrictions around the pandemic and the fact that many local students live too far away to make it easy to meet up to socialise.

“You see in all the movies and hear all the stories that people when they move away to university, it’s the time of their lives and in my experience with uni it’s been anything but,” Mr Noack said.

The university provided counselling last year, which he appreciates but did not find especially helpful. “They basically just said ‘look, everyone’s experiencing this, you’ll be right’ and it was probably like a five-minute call,” he said.

Youth mental health foundation Headspace has found most young people are feeling lonely, with the highest rates for 18- to 21-year-olds, and this got worse in the pandemic.

Eliza Gannon, 19, from Sylvania Waters in the Sutherland Shire, finished school at the end of 2019 and went to Europe on a gap year, cutting the trip short when the pandemic started.

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She arrived back in Australia during the first national lockdown and found it hard to maintain her wider friendships due to the restrictions and people moving on with their lives. She is now only in regular contact with her best friend and one other girl from school. Starting her communications degree at the University of Sydney has not filled the void because of the limited time on campus.

“I have people I sit with, and we text and stuff, but we haven’t really caught up outside uni,” Ms Gannon said.