বাংলা | Epaper

বাংলা E-Paper 📍 Dhaka 📅 Thursday | 12 November 2026, 27 Kartik 1433 PID registration number 06

HEADLINE

● PM inspects eco-friendly jute products at COP31 summit ● PM urges 50 per cent climate funds ● Govt moves to buy LNG from 3 countries ● Rizvi alleges deliberate attempts to create anarchy ● State minister urges online media to stand against terrorism, fascism ● DU bomb blasts: Chinese students leaving country ● RMG owners threaten factory shutdowns

Post-COVID friendships: A hidden economic challenge

Published : Thursday, 12 November, 2026 at 3:23 PM

Muhammad Shafiullah & Tahmid Zarif

There is a typical contradiction in university life. Students have never been more connected, and yet many find it increasingly difficult to make a peer they can call a friend.

A student can enter a university with hundreds of people around him or her who remain active on social media platforms throughout the day, attend classes surrounded by peers, and participate in group projects or presentations, and still return home with the feeling that there is no one with whom he or she can have an unstructured conversation. Social media is flooded with stories of loneliness. The problem necessarily lies not in the absence of people but in the growing scarcity of meaningful social relationships that is termed socialization.

This became particularly visible after the COVID-19 pandemic. Universities reopened, classrooms became crowded, and academic life gradually returned to normal, although it took more than three years to get everything on track. Yet social life did not necessarily return to its pre-pandemic form. For many students, particularly those who entered university during or immediately after the pandemic, the interruption of ordinary socialization altered the way friendships are initiated.

This is often discussed as a psychological problem. Moreover, it is certainly both. But there is another dimension that deserves considerably more attention, i.e., global economics. Friendship may appear to be outside the domain of economics, but economists study much more than demand and supply, prices, markets, and trade. Economics is fundamentally concerned with scarcity, incentives, human behavior, opportunity costs, productivity, and the allocation of resources. Social isolation can affect educational outcomes, labor market performance, health expenditure, and overall productivity.

The post-pandemic difficulty of making friends among university students is not merely a private inconvenience, but it represents a minute and important component of a much larger economic phenomenon. To know more, we interviewed five university students to know their insight about making friends and how global economics affects the entire ecosystem alongside their personal lives. The interviewees provided insights into how social isolation, changes in communication practice, academic pressure alongside peer pressure, and financial concerns have influenced their ability to form and maintain meaningful friendships.

The findings also highlighted a connection between their personal and social lives resulting in broader economic conditions. Overall, the interviewees reflected that post-COVID friendship challenges are not only a social issue but also reflect wider economic and lifestyle changes affecting their young minds and surroundings.

The pandemic interrupted more than education

For university students, friendship is rarely formed through a formal transaction. It usually develops through repeated, low-cost encounters sitting beside someone before class, sharing food, walking between corridors, discussing an assignment, joining a club, participating in competitions, or simply spending time together without any mere purpose.

The pandemic eliminated a major portion of all these factors. Classes had moved online. Students who should have been experiencing their first years of independence spent long hours in front of Zoom. New university entrants often met classmates through screens before meeting them physically. Existing friendships were maintained through messaging rather than physical proximity.

A 2024 paper published by a team including a number of Bangladeshi scientists in the year 2024 in Heliyon-Cell Press states that 59 percent of students reported that lockdown had a significant impact on their mental health and well-being. They described difficulties with social isolation and loneliness, motivation, and interpersonal conflict within families. Students' knowledge of COVID-19 was high, with television, newspapers, online, and social media being the main sources of information; few relied on government reports.

Most pressing concerns were timely graduation and employment (83%), not being able to socialize (46%), being stuck at home (37%), and financial difficulties regarding university fees (29%).

From friendship to social capital

A friend may recommend an internship. A senior may introduce an assistant to a researcher. A classmate may share information about a scholarship. A former teammate may recommend someone for a job years after graduation. Although the two students may possess similar human capital, the student with a stronger social network may have greater access to information, referrals, internships, and employment opportunities, giving social capital tangible economic value. This social capital phenomenon can significantly affect their access to economic opportunities.

Yet they can produce significant economic returns later. This is why friendship should not be dismissed as an entirely private matter.

Consider two students with identical grades, identical technical skills, and identical degrees. One has developed a broad network of classmates, seniors, alumni, teachers, and professional contacts. The other has remained socially isolated throughout university. Their human capital may be similar. Their social capital is not. That difference can become economically meaningful then. In labor markets where information is imperfect, networks reduce information costs. Employers frequently rely on recommendations, referrals, and professional relationships. Workers also depend on networks to discover vacancies that may never be publicly advertised. Friendship, in this sense, can function as an informal information infrastructure.

When young people struggle to build relationships, the loss is therefore not confined to companionship. They may also lose access to mentorship, collaboration, and opportunities.

The experience is not uniform across all university students. Private universities have a distinctive social and economic environment. Students often come from geographically dispersed backgrounds, travel considerable distances to attend lectures, and maintain demanding academic and extracurricular schedules. Many do not live in university residences. They attend classes for a limited number of hours and then return home. This matters because friendship requires something that modern university schedules increasingly make scarce: that is, repeated exposure.

A residential university naturally produces opportunities for spontaneous interaction. Students meet in dining halls, corridors, libraries, dormitories, sports grounds, and common rooms. A commuter student may encounter the same classmate only twice a week for a particular course.

The difference is subtle but economically important. The probability of developing a meaningful relationship generally rises with repeated interaction. If two people continuously share physical space, the cost of initiating a conversation falls. If their interaction is limited to a four-wall classroom and disappears immediately afterward, the opportunity cost of friendship rises. This produces an unusual form of scarcity. The problem is not simply about social scarcity only.

The opportunity cost of friendship

For today's university students, socializing competes with an expanding list of activities such as academic assignments, examinations, internships, competitions, part-time work, volunteering, organizational commitments, skill development, networking, and digital content creation.

A student may genuinely want to make friends but end up spending three hours completing an assignment. This creates a paradox.

Professional networking often begins with instrumental motives. Friendship, by contrast, requires a degree of purposelessness. People need time to discuss ordinary things, share experiences, and develop trust without constantly calculating the return. The modern student therefore faces a peculiar economic tension. This may partly explain why some university environments appear socially active while students simultaneously report loneliness.

The digital paradox

Technology has reduced the cost of communication almost to zero. A message can cross continents instantly. Video calls can connect people separated by thousands of kilometers. Social media allows students to maintain hundreds of weak connections simultaneously. Yet cheaper communication has not necessarily produced deeper and real relationships.

Recent analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reflected that across OECD countries, in-person interaction has declined over the past 15 years, while frequent contact through phones and digital platforms has increased. The organization also reports that social isolation has grown more rapidly in the years following COVID-19, with young people among the groups experiencing the most deterioration in several social connection indicators. This is not an argument that technology is inherently harmful. Digital platforms performed an extraordinary social function during the pandemic. For millions of students, they were the only available bridge to classmates, teachers, and friends.

The problem begins when a substitute becomes the default. Digital communication is efficient, but efficiency is not always equivalent to welfare. A technology can reduce the monetary and time cost of communication while simultaneously changing the quality of the interaction.

A 10 second reaction to a story is communication. A group containing 150 people is a network. A follower is a connection. Thus, the distinction matters. The economic implications become clearer when social connection is linked to education, health, and productivity.

The WHO has emphasized that social isolation and loneliness impose economic costs on individuals, employers, and healthcare systems. The transmission mechanism is relatively straightforward. Social isolation can contribute to poorer mental well-being. Poorer educational engagement can affect human-capital accumulation. Lower human capital can influence employment outcomes and future earnings. At the same time, poor social connection may increase demand for healthcare and reduce workplace productivity.

The result is a chain that begins with something seemingly personal, “I have nobody to talk to,” and potentially ends with something measurable in economic terms. This does not mean that every lonely student will become economically unproductive. Nor should loneliness be reduced to an equation. Human behavior is too complex for such simplistic causality. But at the aggregate level, small reductions in educational performance, labor participation, productivity, or health can accumulate into substantial social costs.

Universities themselves have an economic stake in this issue. A university invests heavily in attracting students, providing faculty, infrastructure, laboratories, libraries, extracurricular opportunities, and other facilities. But the return on that investment depends partly on whether students can successfully convert these resources into human capital or not.

If a student attends classes but remains socially disconnected, participates less in university activities and develops weaker networks, part of the university experience remains unrealized. This is particularly important for private universities, whose financial sustainability depends heavily on student demand, retention, and perceived value. This is where student voices become particularly important.

One of our interviewees from, Department of Economics, BRAC University, described difficulty in making close friends after entering university post-COVID. According to him, socialization, even if he adopts, is a myth to others. Our 2nd interviewee, a student from the Department of Economics, University of Dhaka, reflected on the difference between having many acquaintances and having one or two genuinely close friends. A 1st-year student from the Department of Business School, North South University, explained how academic pressure, extracurricular commitments, and digital communication are continuously affecting her social life. And the other two interviewees initiated the same outlook.

The objective should not be to romanticize the pre-COVID period either. University students before the pandemic also experienced loneliness, social anxiety, and difficulty in making friends. COVID-19 did not create these problems from nothing. Rather, it intensified the existing structural pressures and changed the baseline from which young people now socialize.

There is another economic dimension that deserves attention. Today's university students are preparing to enter a labor market characterized by technological change, AI, remote work, automation, and increasingly fluid career paths. In such an economy, technical knowledge matters enormously. But so do communication, collaboration, adaptability, trust, and networks.

Precisely the moment when employers increasingly value interpersonal capabilities, young people may be experiencing fewer opportunities to develop them naturally. Social skills are not developed entirely through lectures or workshops. They are accumulated through practice.

If university students graduate with excellent academic credentials but weaker interpersonal networks and social confidence, the economy may inherit a workforce that is technically capable but socially less connected.

A highly educated person with no network may possess knowledge but struggle to mobilize it.

Not every student has the same ability to overcome social isolation. A student with financial resources may join clubs, travel with friends, participate in conferences, attend social events, or live near campus. Another student may commute long distances, work part-time, carry family responsibilities alongside,alongside and avoid social activities because of their cost. Financial precarity can therefore become societal precarity.

This suggests that the economics of friendship is also partly an economics of access.

Who has time? Who has mobility? Who has disposable income? Who can remain on campus after classes? Who can afford to participate? Who feels socially secure enough to initiate a conversation? These questions are rarely included in university economic models, yet they influence the accumulation of social capital.

Not every activity needs to become a competition, certificate, leadership position, or for a professional resume. Students need places where they can simply exist together. The goal is simple. Increase the number of meaningful opportunities for interaction while lowering the social and financial cost of participating.

Friendship as an economic investment

Perhaps the most important conceptual shift is to stop treating social connection as an activity that competes with productivity. Sometimes, social connection is itself an investment in productivity.

A student who takes an evening away from studying to speak with friends has not necessarily wasted that evening. The conversation may improve emotional resilience, and stress that becomes useful later. This is where conventional productivity thinking can become too narrow. If every hour is evaluated solely by its immediate measurable output, activities whose benefits emerge slowly or indirectly will be undervalued.

We invest in education without knowing exactly which lesson will shape our future. We invest in infrastructure whose benefits emerge over decades. Likewise, we invest in research without knowing which experiment will succeed. Why, then, should investment in social connection be treated as economically irrelevant?

The post-pandemic friendship crisis among university students is ultimately part of a broader global transition.

The world is becoming more digitally connected, urbanized, and economically competitive. At the same time, face-to-face interaction is becoming harder to sustain. This should change the way policymakers think about social connection. Perhaps most importantly, what happens to an economy when an entire generation becomes accustomed to living beside people without necessarily living with them? It is the economic question everyone should ask.

There is another economic dimension that deserves attention. Today’s university students are preparing to enter into a labor market shaped by technological change, artificial intelligence, automation, remote work, and increasingly fluid career paths. In such an economy, technical knowledge matters enormously, but so do emotional intelligence, communication, collaboration, adaptability, and the ability to build and sustain meaningful relationships. These capabilities, often described as soft skills, are not developed entirely through lectures, workshops, or professional networking events but are cultivated through everyday interactions, including friendships, disagreements, shared experiences, and the gradual process of learning to understand others. University friendships can provide an informal environment in which students practise numerous factors, all of which can become valuable in professional and personal life.

Moreover, social networks can facilitate benefits, giving social capital a tangible economic value. When students struggle to establish meaningful relationships, the consequences may therefore extend beyond loneliness.

Although friendship does not guarantee academic achievement or professional success, meaningful social connections can contribute to emotional resilience and the transferable skills required to adapt to uncertainty and work effectively with others. If university students graduate with strong academic credentials but limited interpersonal networks and underdeveloped soft skills, the economy may inherit a workforce that is technically capable yet less prepared for the human dimensions of professional life.

The challenge, therefore, is not to turn friendship into another instrument of productivity, but to recognize that social connection can support both individual well-being and the development of capabilities essential to a more collaborative, adaptable, and productive economy.

Are we connected enough?

The post-COVID university is not necessarily a lonelier place because students have fewer people around them. It may be lonelier because the conditions required for meaningful relationships have become scarcer. Perhaps that is why the economics of friendship deserve more attention than they currently receive.

A university can build a magnificent campus, install the fastest internet, and offer world-class courses. But if students do not find meaningful ways to connect with one another, a crucial part of the educational experience remains unfinished.

The future economy will need technically competent graduates. It will also need people who can trust, collaborate, communicate, and build communities. The first is taught in classrooms. The second is often learned between them. And if the post-pandemic generation is finding those spaces increasingly difficult to enter, then the scarcity is not merely emotional but rather economic.

For the young minds ahead, don’t mistake being active on social media or being surrounded by people in class for real friendship. Even on a campus with thousands of students, the real problem is the shortage of meaningful relationships. So make time for your peers beyond group projects and presentations, like grabbing a tea or just hanging out and chatting. Focus on building a few close, genuine friendships rather than collecting many acquaintances. And if you feel lonely, don't be ashamed. Reaching out and starting the conversation yourself is the first step to go.