Chelsea Jia Feng/Insider
It took just one semester for Rushil Srivastava to realize that college was not what he had hoped. "As a kid, you always imagine college will be a life-changing experience, and that your freshman year is where you'll get a chance to discover yourself," he said. Instead, he was forced to take classes online in the wake of COVID and faced a campus social scene that remained fractured. The computer-science major wound up dropping out of UC Berkeley in fall 2021, only a few months after he had enrolled.