I recently accepted a different academic appointment at another university, but for the last seven years I taught at Cornell. Many of my students were CS majors headed to six figure jobs at companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. At the time, I felt that my chief function -- in a different department -- was to remind students of their humanity, that there was more to life than a high salary and whatever stability that represented (all the while noting with some irony that my students were soon to be making many times my own paycheck!). But now here I am worrying about my former students: will they be affected? Did they save for the future? How will they navigate this uncertainty? Hopefully they got something out of our work together -- some sense of self worth and resiliency -- that might help at this moment.I was in college during the 2008 recession, and watched the climate on campus go from blissful certainty to true trepidation about the future (recently graduated friends with huge salaries as consultants at investment banking firms suddenly laid off), even at one of the top universities in the country. I wonder how this most recent crisis will affect the climate on university campuses.

I recently accepted a different academic appointment at another university, but for the last seven years I taught at Cornell. Many of my students were CS majors headed to six figure jobs at companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. At the time, I felt that my chief function -- in a different department -- was to remind students of their humanity, that there was more to life than a high salary and whatever stability that represented (all the while noting with some irony that my students were soon to be making many times my own paycheck!). But now here I am worrying about my former students: will they be affected? Did they save for the future? How will they navigate this uncertainty? Hopefully they got something out of our work together -- some sense of self worth and resiliency -- that might help at this moment.I was in college during the 2008 recession, and watched the climate on campus go from blissful certainty to true trepidation about the future (recently graduated friends with huge salaries as consultants at investment banking firms suddenly laid off), even at one of the top universities in the country. I wonder how this most recent crisis will affect the climate on university campuses.

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