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Incoming freshmen listen to a more senior student at a University at Albany summer orientation program in 2017.
In-person events like this have proven to reduce dropout rates for first-year students,
but some may be canceled this year because of the pandemic.
The Hechinger Report
While focus is on fall, students’ choices about college will have a far longer impact
Delaying enrollment, slowing to part time lower the odds of ever getting a degree
By Jon Marcus
May 29, 2020
When she thinks about a student going through college, Kristen Renn
imagines a seedling growing into a tree: There are a lot of things that
could go wrong along the way.
“One cataclysmic event can do it in,” said Renn, a professor of higher,
adult and lifelong education at Michigan State University.
An entire forest of potential future graduates is now imperiled by the
cataclysmic pandemic that has large numbers of students saying they
will delay their higher educations, take time off, opt for community
college or shift to studying part time.
While attention has been focused on the impact of these choices on
enrollment in the fall, each has also been shown to slow down or derail
students on their way to degrees. For them, and for employers who need
educated graduates, that means the effects of this crisis will be felt
not just for one semester, but for six or more years.
That’s how long it takes some undergraduates to finish college, if they
ever do, even in the best of times. Now, just as happened in the last
recession, it is likely to take them even longer and cost more, while —
after years of hard-won progress — dropout rates rise and graduation
rates fall.
“We’re so focused on the now and on the short-term future, said
Laura Perna, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate
School of Education. “It’s much harder to think about the long term,
but there are serious long-term consequences to this.”
Ten percent of high school seniors planning to attend a four-year
college or university before the pandemic now say they’re going to do
something else. But high school graduates who put off college often end
up never going.
Most affected will be Americans who are already way behind their peers
in completing higher education: those who come from low-income families
and whose parents never finished college.
“This could add a year or two easily to a student’s time to degree,” said Renn.
That’s the inescapable lesson of history and research.
Worried about having to take classes online or not sure how they’ll
pay, for instance, 10 percent of high school seniors planning to attend
a four-year college or university before the pandemic now say they’re
going to do something else, the consulting firm SimpsonScarborough
reports. About half say they will enroll at a community college.
But high school graduates who put off college often end up never going,
the most recent available federal study on the subject found. And only
45 percent of people who enter community college full time earn
associate degrees in even six years, according to the National Student
Clearinghouse Research Center.
Some of these students say they ultimately plan to transfer from
community college to a four-year university and get a bachelor’s degree.
But only 13 percent of community college students manage to achieve
that goal, the Community College Research Center at Teachers College,
Columbia University, says. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this
story, is also housed at Teachers College.)
“For some students [community college] will be like a detour,” Renn said, “and for others it will be an off ramp.”
Of students who have changed their education plans, 15 percent say they
will reduce the number of courses or the amount of training they take,
another survey, by the nonprofit Strada Education Network, found.
But studying part time also significantly lowers success rates. More
than half of part-time students still hadn’t earned a credential six
years after starting college, the National Student Clearinghouse
Research Center says.
Even if graduating high school seniors say they are only delaying their
educations, and will eventually go to college, “their likelihood of
actually enrolling a year or two years later is lower, and therefore
their chances of getting a degree is lower,” said Watson Scott Swail,
president and CEO of the Educational Policy Institute.
Some may find jobs, start earning money, and stay put, he said. Others
will lose the helpful momentum of peer pressure. “You’re going to be
behind your friends,” said Swail. “In your head, you’ve lost the race.”
Of course, many of these decisions about whether, where and how to go
to college are being driven by new financial realities. While wealthier
families still may largely be able to afford the cost of college,
growing numbers of lower- and middle-income Americans — who were
already struggling to pay — have now lost jobs or fear they will.
“What’s happening right now is putting families into a very
precarious position for whom paying for college was precarious to begin
with,” said Lindsay Page, an associate professor at the University of
Pittsburgh School of Education who studies how students get to and
through college.
“This is not going to affect families for a semester,” she said. “It’s going to affect them for a really long time.”
Some low-income prospective students now are working to help their
families, said Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the advocacy group
Complete College America; others are seeing record unemployment rates
and wondering whether there will be any jobs for them, even with
degrees.
“It’s hard enough under regular circumstances to help students
understand why college is important,” said Spiva. “Trying to get
students to understand the value proposition of college now is going to
be a more difficult and arduous undertaking.”
All of these new barriers and delays will likely further widen the
nation’s broader socioeconomic divide, Page and other experts said.
Incoming freshmen listen to a more senior student at a University at
Albany summer orientation program in 2017. In-person events like this
have proven to reduce dropout rates for first-year students, but some
may be canceled this year because of the pandemic. Credit: Sarah
Garland/The Hechinger Report
“It’s middle- and lower-income students who I think will be wildly thrown off by this,” Renn said.
Already, only 12 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded by age 24 go to
people in the bottom quarter of income, new research from the Pell
Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education finds,
compared to nearly 75 percent that go to those in the top half.
“From high school graduation out toward college, we’re seeing Covid
make it even less likely that low-income, first-generation students of
color do what we hope they will, which is get a bachelor’s degree,”
said Liane Hypolite, an assistant professor of educational leadership
at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Although college and university enrollment went up after the last
recession, as more Americans sought education at a time when jobs were
also scarce, there was a distinctive socioeconomic divide, the National
Student Clearinghouse Research Center found.
Students from wealthier families continued to attend the priciest
institutions while more lower- and middle-income families chose
community colleges, which the College Board reports cost about a third
as much as the lowest-tier public four-year universities and one-tenth
as much as the lowest-tier four-year privates.
Dropout rates rose and graduation rates fell.
Since then, both statistics had begun to improve. The proportion of
students dropping out between their first and second years, in any kind
of university or college, fell 2 percentage points, and the proportion
earning any kind of a degree within six years grew 5 percentage
points as institutions put more resources into prodding their students
to succeed — often under pressure from policymakers who tied their
funding to such measures.
“We were making some good strides in supporting those students and
improving completion rates,” said Bradley Custer, senior policy analyst
for postsecondary education at the progressive nonprofit Center for
American Progress.
How delicate these seedlings are, however, is evident from the fact
that, even accounting for this progress, 26 percent of students still
quit before their second year and 34 percent still haven’t graduated
after their sixth.
Now there’s fear that financial problems could prompt institutions,
some of which have already begun layoffs, to reduce support for
students who need it. Student planning and advising offices consume $1
billion a year of university budgets, according to the consulting firm
Tyton Partners.
“Those kinds of programs aren’t cheap, and colleges are really strapped right now,” Page said.
Already, fewer than a third of university and college advisers say they
can always meet the needs of their students, Tyton Partners found in a
survey of 2,500 administrators, advisers, counselors and faculty. The
rest say their case loads are too big to keep up with.
That could take a particular toll on first-year students and returning
adults, many of whom need extra counseling. And if their institutions
continue to teach online in the fall, as some have announced they will,
it may be even tougher.
“Our students are out there floundering,” said Hypolite, who still
advises graduating seniors at a charter school in Boston where she
previously worked. “Once they hit a few roadblocks, without a person
and a contact and a human being who can help guide them through the
process, they’ll say, ‘I’m over it.’ ”
Spiva likens the job of advisers right now to that of contact tracers
helping to find people exposed to the coronavirus. “We’re going to have
to do some contact tracing to find our students, in some cases,” she
said. And that will have to happen even with advisers’ already high
caseloads and the possibility that their funding will be cut.
There are glimmers of optimism. The experience of juggling work and
family while being shut down at home, for instance, may have made the
broader public more sympathetic to the challenges faced by working
students with children, and more willing to support services that might
help them, said Perna, at Penn.
Some students are opting for community college with a plan to transfer
to a four-year university for a bachelor’s degree. But only 13 percent
of community college students reach that goal.
“There’s a lot of complexity that most people haven’t been aware of,”
she said. “Everyone as they’re trying to do work is understanding that
colleagues have families and other sorts of constraints. When you have
those multiple responsibilities, there’s a precariousness to it. The
whole house of cards can crumble.”
Public attitudes toward community colleges also may warm, said Karen
Stout, president of Achieving the Dream, which works with those
institutions to improve their graduation rates and the odds that their
students can successfully transfer to four-year institutions. “And that
puts pressure on policymakers to ensure that there are strong
credit-transfer policies.”
But there are other problems. Should large enough numbers of students
put off college but then show up on campus next spring or the following
fall, for instance, it could create a sudden surge in demand for
required courses that outstrips the supply, Page said.
“Students may be facing these course-level pileups and also
advising-load pileups” that delay them on the way to their degrees, she
said. “By the time they register, the class is full.”
And, in a vicious cycle, anything that slows them down diminishes the chances that they’ll ever finish, said Swail.
“It’s like a 100-meter dash or hurdles,” he said. “If you make the race
a little longer, you add another 10 meters onto it, it just gets harder
and harder to reach the finish line.”
Even students who do show up in the fall may not experience the usual
in-person first-year orientation programs universities and colleges
have built up over the last decade to get them accustomed to the campus
and introduce them to each other, which have helped reduce the dropout
rate, said Jennifer Keup, executive director of the National Resource
Center for The First-Year Experience at the University of South
Carolina.
But Keup sees hope, too.
The purpose of those programs, she said, is to take “a diversity of
individuals you’re bringing to a campus and make it into a community”
by finding things that first-year students can agree they share in
common.
And, said Keup, “we’ve never had a more common human experience than we’re having right now.”
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