Many students said their grades during the violence were worse than they expected.
A growing body of data offers a nuanced picture of the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has created for a generation of students who enrolled in higher education at the start of the public health crisis.
In addition, nearly 73 percent of students who started college for the first time during the 2019-20 school year experienced stress and anxiety related to the pandemic the following school year, according to data the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released this morning.
But the data shows that those concerns affected certain groups of students more than others.
For example, nearly 90 percent of students who identified as transgender or gender non-conforming reported stress as a result of the pandemic, compared to 80 percent of female students and 64 percent of male students. And the source of that concern varies by group of people as well; Female, male and female, Black, Aboriginal and senior students were among those who reported higher rates of job loss and difficulty paying for housing or food than their peers who did not share those identities.
“We already knew that almost everyone struggles in some way, but now we have a stronger sense of the outcomes for students who have experienced disruptions or changes due to COVID-19 because of the longitudinal design of this study,” said NCES commissioner Peggy Carr. in the news release.
The new data is part of the first observation of the latest Beginning Postsecondary Student Longitudinal Study, which spends six years following a cohort of about 37,330 students enrolled in college in 2019-2020.
David Richards, director of research at NCES who oversaw the production of the report, said this iteration of the study—NCES has conducted a similarly designed study every six to eight years since 1990—coincidentally coincided with the beginning of the epidemic. , which revealed the opportunity to include questions about disruptions related to student surveys administered during the 2020-21 academic year.
“It’s close to zero in terms of when the epidemic started, so the effects are likely to be stronger and easier to measure,” Richards said. “If we continue from that year, the consequences of COVID-19 will be very bad.”
NCES, a statistical center in the Institute of Education Sciences of the US Department of Education, uses a combination of student surveys and institutional and state data to track the cohort of beginning students over a six-year period. The goal is to collect nationally representative data on persistence and completion rates, career transitions, demographic characteristics of students, and changes over time in student goals, marital status, income and debt, among other indicators.
The new report also provides data on completion and retention from 2022, or the midpoint of the longitudinal study, which will be completed at the end of this academic year.
Although only a small percentage of students in the pandemic-era cohort had received their credentials by June 2022, 65 percent were still enrolled in college for the 2021-22 academic year. And while 23 percent had quit by then, they did so at a much lower rate than their peers in the previous cohort, 44 percent of whom had quit by the three-year mark.
That suggests that “higher education has done very well in the face of very good challenges,” said Nathan D. Grawe, a professor of economics and enrollment expert at Carleton College.
But graduation rates were low: Only 7 percent of the current cohort had completed an associate degree at the three-year mark, compared to 11 percent of the 2011 cohort.
“Given the disturbances documented in the current study, that result is not surprising,” Grawe said in an email. “Furthermore, the current NCES study is only a 3-year snapshot—we will learn more about the final results in future waves of achievement.”
Grades Worse Than Expected
New potential researchers of the access factor are not included in this group to study online, which most of the students were forced to participate in because of the pandemic.
Of first-time students who took most or all of their courses online during the 2020-21 school year, 72 percent received some form of credential in 2022 saying they were more active in online learning; 31 percent of those students reported receiving lower grades than expected due to the pandemic.
By comparison, 80 percent of students who did not receive a certificate in 2022 (but were still enrolled three years after starting college) said they took most or all of their classes online during the 2020–21 academic year; 41 percent of those students said they received grades below their expectations.
The discrepancy between students’ expected performance and their actual grades may be due to the increase in online learning caused by the pandemic, said Ed Venit, managing director at EAB, an education consulting firm. “Because of this, the actual way we deliver education changes and expectations may not match the current classroom environment,” he said.
But he added that there’s also a deeper, longer-term problem at play: The learning loss caused by the pandemic may be leaving students less prepared for college-level work than their professors expected.
Therefore, the learning loss seen in the NCES report is “just the beginning of the curve,” he said, noting that students who attended high school during the violence will carry their deficits into college in the next decade. “This is the beginning of a trend that is likely to intensify.”