College Readiness after Covid – Research Portion
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 created a huge transformation throughout the globe, including towards millions of students, impacting their overall higher education. With over 13,000 institutions shifting towards online education, and some using a mix of online and in-person classes, this change not only impacted their studies, but as well as their feelings, and overall goals and achievements. Going from virtual-mode to in-person mode, all while entering a greater level of education was a dramatic change for students. In this article we will analyze how the mode of instruction impacted students, following the question; Did the mode of instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic impact highschool graduates’ college readiness negatively and if so, how?
As known, the educational mode throughout the pandemic was virtual, also known as synchronous learning. Due to this being an abnormal form of learning, this caused students throughout the globe to transition, and adapt to this. A study shown in the article How Has COVID Affected College Students? by Jane Nam, staff writer for Best Colleges’ data center, found that “students identified the transition to remote learning as a significant source of stress. This was not only due to social isolation necessitated by the pandemic. Learning from home meant a loss of academic resources (e.g., internet access, advisors) as well as an increase in distractions (e.g., caring for siblings)” (Nam 9). This lets us know that the transition from in-person mode to virtual mode was a true struggle for students and was not easy to adapt to, impacting them negatively. In the text Adaptability and High School Students’ Online Learning During COVID-19: A Job Demands-Resources Perspective by Andrew J. Martin, professor at university of South Wales, researchers provided a study, based on students’ adaptability capabilities throughout the pandemic. The study concluded that “online learning barriers and parent/home help were associated with lower end of year achievement” (Martin 34). Many students found that learning from home was rather more difficult than in-person learning, due to lack of parent/home help, causing it to be difficult to adapt to these new ways. Students were used to the idea of having meetings with teachers, and receiving that in-person feedback in order to succeed within the subject.
Not only did the pandemic impact students’ end of year achievement throughout highschool, but it also impacted their ability to apply to colleges in the near future through job losses and financial constraints. In the article Assessing the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Nontraditional Students’ Mental Health and Well-Being by Stephanie J. Babb, professor at the University of Houston, Babb discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has made life harder for college students, specifically young adults and those with different life situations. Many students lost jobs in places like restaurants. People who did not have much money had trouble going to college, and students who already had a lot to handle with work and family found things even harder. “Young adults are more likely to work in less stable fields, such as restaurant wait staff, fast food, and retail; all industries that were affected heavily by the pandemic and subsequent closures (Boeren et al., 2020). These types of jobs also put their workers in direct contact with the public, increasing the likelihood of infection, which could also negatively affect them both financially and personally (Boeren et al., 2020)” (Babb 2). Given that young adults are more likely to occupy less stable fields, these closures impacted them greatly. A lot of the time students (highschool and college) use their side jobs to earn money in order to pay for their future/current education, so given the fact that most of these jobs have experienced closures, this impacted their ability to save for their education. “‘Enrollment for first-year students at colleges and universities — which includes two- and four-year institutions and public and private schools — declined a whopping 13%. Of this group, Native American, Hispanic, and Black students witnessed the greatest enrollment drops. We’re starting to see the impact of COVID on those students who normally have a tough time going to college in normal times, and now are struggling to figure out a way, not only how to get to college, how to enroll in college, but also how to pay for it,’ college admissions expert Jeffrey Selingo said in an interview with PBS ” (Kovacs 9-10), states writer for a variety of higher education texts with a masters degree in journalism and background in newspapers, Kasia Kovacs, in the article The Pandemic’s Impact on College Enrollment. Given this information, we can see that students are not enrolling in college anymore as much as pre-pandemic, due to the financial constraints that the pandemic has caused. Between the feeling of losing part of an education and losing the ability to save money for an education, students did not feel prepared for the higher education that they were once excited for, hence the enrollment numbers declining.
Nonetheless, we of course still have students that enrolled and attended University. Since the pandemic has impacted students’ preparedness as seen previously, this results in students’ actual academic performance when they are finally in the college environment. Before the pandemic, school was a lively place. Students filled classrooms, interacting with one another through group projects and life stories. Teachers taught directly with their students, providing personal connections and gaining better teaching strategies and learning took place through in-person discussions, group activities, and hands-on experiments. Due to covid, these experiences were forced to be disrupted, giving students an entirely different educational experience, specifically with hands-on projects, which are usually necessary in order to prepare for college. In the article How Has COVID Affected College Students? by Suzzane Shaffer, student and parent councilor through her blog “Parenting for College”, Shaffer writes, “Many of these students will continue to struggle after high school graduation. They may opt out of college, or arrive on campus unprepared. They simply didn’t get the chance to develop the skills and knowledge base necessary to succeed in college-level courses” (Shaffer 5). Involuntarily, hence the word usage “didn’t get the chance” within Shaffers’ article, students were not able to develop all skills necessary in order to enter college prepared, this itself displays how the mode of instruction impacted students negatively.
Not only will students not be prepared, but there is a high chance that they will not feel prepared enough for college life and education either. We can see this come to life in the article Ready, Set, Go? Impact of the Pandemic on Student Readiness: Laboratories, Preparedness, and Support by Jennifer G. Ramos, head of the department of Chemistry at Purdue University, and Marcy H. Towns, Chemistry professor at Purdue University, we can see how the pandemic significantly impacted traditional lab settings, causing students to lose hands-on experience. “The data indicate that the disruption due to the pandemic has resulted in widely varying laboratory experiences for these students and points toward important implications for laboratory curricula in general chemistry programs” (Ramos, Towns 16). Based on this data, the study concludes that colleges must adjust their teaching styles in order for it to fit what new students are used to, since the pandemic has lowered the amount of experience students have. This tells us that the pandemic has in fact impacted students’ college readiness negatively, by taking away the amount of experience needed in order to excel in the college environment.
Chemistry is not the only subject impacted by this matter. Unfortunately, other subjects like English Language Arts, Social Studies, and Math are also being affected. There is actually real-life evidence where a student was not prepared for college as much as she felt she was in highschool as a result of the pandemic, when she was in fact a great student academically in highschool. This real-life example can be seen in an article we previously spoke on by Suzzane Shaffer, College Preparedness: Recovering from the Pandemic. In this article it states “A new college student at the University of Texas recounted her struggle . She excelled in math prior to the pandemic, but by a slim margin failed the math placement exam that would have put her in calculus as a freshman” (Shaffer 11). This college student was hit by reality when the covid pandemic impacted her ability to do her best, and negatively impacted her tests scores when entering college. This lets us know that the pandemics’ mode of learning prevented students from doing well later on in life, having a negative impact.
Overall, we can see how these articles display the conclusion that the mode of instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic did in fact impact the majority of high school graduates’ college readiness negatively. This can be seen through the adaptation taking a toll on students, preventing them from achieving what they were used to through in-person mode, financial constraints preventing students from applying to college, as well as students just feeling unprepared overall, and for some, taking away the courage to apply to college entirely.
Works Cited
Babb, Stephanie J, et al. “Assessing the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Nontraditional Students’ Mental Health and Well-Being.” Adult Education Quarterly (American Association for Adult and Continuing Education), May 2022, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8883161/#:~:text=The%20effects%20from%20COVID%2D19,when%20compared%20with%20fall%202019.
Kovacs, Kasia. “The Pandemic’s Impact on College Enrollment: BestColleges.” BestColleges.Com, 6 May 2022, www.bestcolleges.com/blog/covid19-impact-on-college-enrollment/#:~:text=COVID%2D19%20has%20caused%20unprecedented,spell%20trouble%20for%20future%20enrollment.
Martin, Andrew J., et al. “Adaptability and High School Students’ Online Learning during COVID-19: A Job Demands-Resources Perspective.” Frontiers, 5 July 2021, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.702163/full.
Nam, Jane. “How Has Covid Affected College Students?: BestColleges.” BestColleges.Com, 2023, www.bestcolleges.com/research/how-has-covid-affected-college-students/#:~:text=From%20declines%20in%20enrollment%20to,its%20mark%20on%20higher%20education.&text=Jane%20Nam%20is%20a%20staff%20writer%20for%20BestColleges’%20Data%20Center.
Ramos, Jennifer Garcia, and Marcy H Towns. “Ready, Set, Go? Impact of the Pandemic on Student Readiness: Laboratories, Preparedness, and Support.” Journal of Chemical Education, 8 June 2023, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10255573/.
Shaffer, Suzanne. “College Preparedness: Recovering from the Pandemic.” CollegiateParent, 17 Oct. 2022, www.collegiateparent.com/academics/college-preparedness-recovering-from-the-pandemic/.