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The extent of the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption for 1.6 billion students, families, and institutions in 2020 is almost incalculable (Hechinger & Lorin, 2020). Among those disruptions is the increased risk associated with university selection and enrollment within the current turbulent job markets and unpredictable economies (Nanath & Kaitheri, 2021). The extant literature confirms that parents are major influences on their children’s educational aspirations and reportedly allow them the freedom to make their university selections (Cho et al., 2008). Return on investment from university learning is commonly reported to be a strong driver of student enrollment (Keane, 2012). Parents are more comfortable with familiar university enrollment decisions and reported experiencing anxiety with some children’s enrollment decisions they perceived to be financially precarious (Holmstrom et al., 2011), especially during troubling economic times. Parents reportedly experience increased anxiety in uncertain environments when facing economic and societal pressure and accordingly increase their involvement in their children’s decisions (Holmstrom et al., 2011). The contextual environment caused by COVID-19 is possibly changing the relationships and roles between parents and students. The pandemic has ushered in an age of economic difficulty for many segments of society across the world and has also exacerbated the student loan crisis and increased the difficulty of finding work-study opportunities (Crew & Manager, 2020).
The East and West are undoubtedly experiencing an unprecedented shock due to the greatly accelerated changes caused by COVID-19. Individuals have experienced non-reversible negative effects, such as emotional breaks in personal relationships due to prolonged isolation periods (Darbishire et al., 2020). At the social level, COVID-19 caused the superimposition of a new social order over an old one. As the basic unit of society, the family is understandably in a state of dizzying disorientation and being forced to react to new conceptions of time, space, relationships, and everything else. Parents are receiving few signals regarding what is appropriate behavior in this radically different new social reality. We propose that some parents will respond by imposing direct control over their children. Support for this assumption stems from the numerous historical instances in which governments declared martial law. Martial law allows a government to assume absolute power through the imposition of its direct control over society. This includes the suspension of civil law and is justified as a measure to overcome wide-scale chaos (Dyzenhaus, 2009). Recent evidence suggests that COVID-19 caused a rise in authoritarian forums of governments (Yeganeh, 2021). Similarly, some parents will assume power in order to increase the probability of success against resistance to their children-focused protective interventions, leading some parents to modify the implicit social contract they have with their children. This modification may occur in the form of a decrease in the level of parents’ openness to their children’s autonomy over the university enrollment decision.