Students forgotten in the crisis? Comparative analysis of the political debate on universities and studying during the Covid-19 pandemic

After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany in March 2020, students - like all other groups in the population - were sent into lockdown. While other groups were allowed to return to work or training in attendance after some weeks, studying took place almost exclusively digitally over several semesters. As a result, students lost important opportunities for exchange and personal development, which were, for example, offered to pupils of a similar age at schools. Based on the agenda setting theory, this paper analyzes the media debate on universities and studying during the pandemic (investigation period 03/2020-09/2021). The thesis to be examined is that the political discrimination of the group of students was accelerated by the low level of public attention for this topic. A corpus of over 90,000 newspaper articles on politics during the pandemic from 56 daily newspapers and a mixed methods approach are used. First, the quantitative representation of the topic (frequency, keywords, concordences) is collected using the computer-linguistic program Sketch Engine. In the second step, 1033 articles are coded manually and topics, people and contexts analyzed qualitatively.