  Recently, the pandemic of the novel Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) has
presented governments with ultimate challenges. In the United States, the
country with the highest confirmed COVID-19 infection cases, a nationwide
social distancing protocol has been implemented by the President. For the first
time in a hundred years since the 1918 flu pandemic, the US population is
mandated to stay in their households and avoid public contact. As a result, the
majority of public venues and services have ceased their operations. Following
the closure of the University of Washington on March 7th, more than a thousand
colleges and universities in the United States have cancelled in-person classes
and campus activities, impacting millions of students. This paper aims to
discover the social implications of this unprecedented disruption in our
interactive society regarding both the general public and higher education
populations by mining people's opinions on social media. We discover several
topics embedded in a large number of COVID-19 tweets that represent the most
central issues related to the pandemic, which are of great concerns for both
college students and the general public. Moreover, we find significant
differences between these two groups of Twitter users with respect to the
sentiments they expressed towards the COVID-19 issues. To our best knowledge,
this is the first social media-based study which focuses on the college student
community's demographics and responses to prevalent social issues during a
major crisis.
