College after COVID

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 30th of August, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

This fall as high school graduates go to college, some educators worry that they aren’t ready. School closures and remote learning during the pandemic have left many students lacking the skills necessary for success in college. WORLD’s Lauren Dunn reports.

LAUREN DUNN, REPORTER: Herbie Walker is the president of the Western Association for College Admission Counseling. He’s also the director of college counseling at Faith Lutheran School in Las Vegas, Nev., and he volunteers with local student programs, working with students from several high schools.

WALKER: I've noticed with the students I have been working with again, this is anecdotal is that students are having a much harder time expressing themselves. I'm seeing personal statements that are exceedingly vague in general. And I struggle to get kids to kind of get into more nuanced details about what's happened in their personal lives or personal academics and things like that.

Walker doesn’t think virtual schooling itself is always the problem. Instead, he points to the last-minute need to hurriedly switch to remote learning, and then the later switch back to traditional classroom instruction.

WALKER: I've seen some very successful online virtual programs, but I really believe what was being underestimated was the amount of effort to turn that battleship around and then around again, which caused learning loss as teachers were learning new formats, new ways of approaching.

Remote learning may have worked for some students. But for others, remote learning severely complicated their education.

WALKER: But even a school that was giving a top quality, virtual experience, the students on the other side didn't have an ideal situation to receive that education, meaning they were in homes where they may or may not have had stable Wi Fi or they didn't have a computer or if they had a computer, if there was more than one kid in the in the home, how are they sharing computers were there enough computers to go around was the bandwidth enough for three kids to be logged into virtual at the same time.

Most schools in the country closed for the last few weeks of the spring 2020 semester, shifting millions of students to online learning. Some reopened for in-person learning in fall 2020. Many offered hybrid learning, with students attending school in-person in smaller cohorts only on certain days of the week. In some places, students didn’t return to school full-time until fall 2021.

Now, as those students enter college, some are finding it’s a bigger jump than they thought.

Allison Wagner is the founding executive director of All-In Milwaukee, a college completion program.

WAGNER: We're very concerned that they're coming to college, academically malnourished. I reviewed 324 transcripts from Milwaukee students, and it was very concerning to see the number of them that had early release in order to go and work for half the day. And I think that was from pandemic. You know, during the pandemic, a lot of students were in virtual learning, so they were actually working, and then doing minimal school.

The non-profit first welcomed 40 freshman students to the program in 2019, and this year accepted over three times that number.

Wagner says that many students also face mental health needs like anxiety or the lingering effects of isolation. This means some students may have even greater difficulty adjusting to college life.

WAGNER: So this summer, we tried to get as many of our students as possible into summer bridge programs that actually included college courses, we wanted to make sure they had a true understanding of what the college classes will feel like. And it's much better to take one or two classes than it is to take a full load. So we really wanted them, if you will, to test drive the car before they bought it.

But some high school graduates will choose to skip college altogether. According to College Track, over a quarter of high school seniors from low-income families decided against college during the pandemic.

Elizabeth Morgan is the chief of external relations for the National College Attainment Network.

MORGAN: Many of our students, before the pandemic, were on the edge about whether to go to college or not, right, it was going to be a big lift for them and a big risk in many ways. And the additional uncertainty of the pandemic, it just tipped the balance for them.

Morgan said some students went straight into the workforce to help support family members. Often, they worked jobs that paid well due to low employment rates. Other students didn’t enroll in college because some were still virtual.

MORGAN: Especially in that, you know, the first year of the pandemic, where students were looking at having to go to college online, right? They just maybe finished high school online, and then looking at college online, and they said, I don't want to do that, right? I don't want that. And I wouldn't do well at that. It's not good for me, right? So in a lot of ways, students made a lot of very rational choices here.

But Morgan said more students may opt for college now that classes are once again in-person. She pointed to rising financial aid application numbers as an indicator that more students are planning on college.

Herbie Walker in Nevada also thinks there could be signs of progress. He says 2022 high school graduates may have an advantage over graduates from the year before because of their in-person learning in their senior year. He also hopes to see financial aid for lower-income students return to pre-pandemic levels.

WALKER: I'm very much excited for this upcoming year, because it's going to be the most normal admission cycle we've had in about three years.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lauren Dunn.

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