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USA Today
Brookings Institute
Higher education’s reopening decisions affected the most vulnerable students
Kristen E. Broady, Eliana Buckner, Jennifer Umanzor, and Sarah Wheaton
Monday, January 11, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic hit higher education on March 6, 2020 when the
University of Washington became the first major U.S. university to
cancel in-person classes and have students take courses and finals
remotely. What followed was a tidal wave of shuttered campuses,
canceled study abroad programs, and students and faculty alike
scrambling to make sense of remote learning amid spiking infection
rates across the country.
Surviving the end of the academic year, however, was only the beginning
of a larger, looming higher education crisis. Over the summer, schools
wrestled with the difficult question: what should be done about the
fall? Davidson College’s College Crisis Initiative (C2i) collaboration
with the Chronicle of Higher Education tracked colleges’ fall
decisions, categorizing them as online, in-person, or some combination
of the two. We use that data to examine trends in schools’
decision-making, shedding light on the contributing factors and
eventual consequences of those decisions.
In our analysis, we find that while nearly every school in our sample
offered in-person experiences in March, only about 30 percent were
planning to maintain that in-person experience by September. Public
schools and community colleges were particularly likely to go online.
We examine some of the factors underlying those switches as well as the
consequences. We find that differing financial pressures on public
schools, private schools, and community colleges likely played a role
in their decisions. We also find that those decisions appear to have
had a significant impact on the enrollment decisions and educational
outcomes of students attending each type of school, potentially
changing the makeup of this generation’s college students. As schools
began making decisions about the spring 2021 semester, it was
especially important to reflect on what decisions were made in the
fall, why they were made, and what effects these reopening plans could
have on students.
Reopening Decisions
Using the C2i panel data, we look at the reopening decisions of 2,958
colleges and universities over the course of the pandemic. The
non-representative sample contains 1,588 public schools and 1,355
private schools. Four-year schools are overrepresented in the sample,
with 2,007 four-year institutions and 936 two-year institutions. By
far, the largest group in the sample is private, non-profit four-year
schools, which represent 43 percent of the total sample.
Between March and September, roughly 1,800 schools changed their
reopening plans at least once. The peak of switches came after
mid-July, when many schools were scrapping their intended plans for the
fall and making a new reopening decision.
While only 24 schools in the sample offered exclusively online
education when the pandemic began in March, 1,160 schools had decided
to go exclusively online by July. By September, 50 schools that had
intended to be in-person and 32 that intended to be hybrid as of July
had also moved to being fully online. While most schools that made
changes moved toward going online, 617 schools moved to hybrid models
by July. That number decreased to 586 in September as more schools
moved online. Finally, in September, 742 schools chose to remain
entirely in-person. There was a significant amount of public concern
about schools changing their plans at the last minute. However, Figure
1 shows that in fact most schools stuck with the decisions they had
made earlier in the summer even with spikes in COVID-19 cases in some
parts of the country.
We find that four-year private institutions had the highest share of
schools choosing to remain in person in the fall, with only 381
schools, or 34 percent, going fully online. Community colleges had the
highest share of online reopening decisions, with 543 schools, or 63
percent, choosing to entirely move away from in-person classes.
This disparity is likely in part due to a decade-long trend of moving
toward online learning in higher education at two-year schools. Prior
to the pandemic, community college students were more likely than their
counterparts at four-year public or private institutions to be enrolled
in at least one online course, with 14% of all community college
students studying exclusively online (although not necessarily at an
exclusively online institution) in 2018. However, the differential
spike in online enrollment clearly extends beyond enrollment trends
that predate the pandemic. We examine one reason for the trend in the
next section.
Money Matters
Decisions on how to hold classes are complicated and involve many
factors. However, we find that one important factor associated with
those decisions is the financial makeup of different types of
institutions. The three sectors mentioned above (four-year private,
four-year public, and two-year) receive their funding in different
ways, with additional differences between public and private two-year
schools, as shown in Figure 3. While both private schools and public
schools have faced pressure to keep their doors open, public schools
seem to have had less financial incentive and fewer resources to do so.
Four-year colleges and universities, particularly private schools, tend
to offer a residential component, while only 28% of two-year programs
provided on-campus housing in 2015, though it is becoming more common.
As a result, four-year schools are more vulnerable to a loss of revenue
from canceling in-person experiences, such as residential housing,
dining services, and parking. These services represent an average of
$5,000 and $3,000 in revenue per student for private and public
four-year institutions respectively, compared to less than $2,000 per
student for both public and private two-year institutions.
When contrasting public and private institutions of higher education,
other differences in funding arise. Private schools rely on tuition and
fees, private gifts, and endowment funds for revenue, while public
schools rely more heavily on state and local funding sources (Figure
3). Appropriations for public schools have been shrinking, with
state funding being slashed by over $7 billion since 2008 leading to
relatively constrained budgets for public schools. As a result, public
schools had fewer resources than private schools to install technology
like keycard systems, rapid testing, and other systems that made
in-person learning possible during the pandemic.
Moreover, among all the different types of schools, endowment assets
are most common in the private sector, and are highly concentrated. Not
every school has utilized its endowment fund in the current crisis, as
these funds are often thought of as intended for future investments.
Nonetheless, endowments provide a cushion in funding that private
two-year schools and public schools generally lack.
The Missing Cohort
This section highlights which kinds of students have forgone higher
education in recent months or dropped out, likely in reaction to
movements to online classes. Online learning can offer flexibility and
accessibility, but it also can present challenges to learning outcomes.
In particular, there are some groups of students for whom online
education works poorly. Anticipating these challenges and more, 55
percent of students not returning for fall 2020 cited changes in class
format.
In a case study, The Public Policy Institute of California found that
students of color and nontraditional students are more likely to have
challenges that put them at risk of lowered performance in an online
setting, widening existing achievement gaps. Some challenges they are
more likely to face include trying to study in a stressful home
environment or an inability to access reliable internet.
Because of the nature of the populations that different schools serve,
lower-income students are more likely to find their classes moved
online. As shown above, two-year institutions were the most likely to
move their classes from in-person to online. Roughly 15 percent of
students at two-year schools come from families in the bottom income
quintile, while the share is 9 percent of those at four-year public
schools and 6 percent at four-year private schools. What this means is
that low-income, underrepresented students are more likely to be
struggling with the consequences of online schooling. And, if those
students choose to drop out, that has dire consequences on lifetime
earnings, given that those with bachelor’s degrees earn twice that of
high school graduates.
Indeed, the discrepancies in experience have led to marked decreases in
enrollment, especially for underprivileged students, for whom home
environment or internet access may be more likely to present a
challenge. New Census data suggests that students from households
making less than $75,000 per year were almost twice as likely to forego
college this year as those making more. The enrollment changes have
also been marked along racial lines, with Black undergraduate students
having been the most likely to see drops in enrollment for summer 2020.
Community colleges, which typically serve students of color or of
low-income backgrounds, accordingly held the largest share of
enrollment drops for fall 2020, with first time student enrollment at
public two-years plummeting by nearly 23 percent.
Compounding these problems, individuals who drop out are unlikely to
re-enroll. From 2013-2018, within a group of 29 million observed
students, 87 percent of college dropouts failed to re-enroll within the
observation period.
Conclusion
Colleges have faced difficult trade-offs when deciding if, and how, to
open their physical doors to students this year. While holding
in-person classes can affect the health and safety of students, it is
important to note the consequences of holding online classes for those
who are typically underrepresented in institutions of higher education.
As the fallout of the pandemic continues to unfold, educational
institutions must consider the broad impacts of online learning on
retention, learning opportunities, and student achievement. They face
difficult decisions for the upcoming semester and should choose policy
solutions that protect and support the most academically vulnerable
students.
Economic inequality persists in the United States, particularly along
racial lines. A college degree is one significant pathway for
lower-income young adults to improve lifetime earnings. All told, the
greatest toll of the pandemic will be the disruption in upward mobility
for the current cohort of low-income students.
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