Jazeba Ahmad
was a junior in high school when
COVID-19 hit and her math education faltered.
Ahmad was enrolled in an international baccalaureate math class intended to
provide a strong foundation in areas like algebra, geometry, statistics, and
calculus.
اضافة اعلان
But her high school in
Columbus,
Ohio, made a rocky transition to remote learning, she said, and soon,
math classes passed with little to show for them. By her first year at Columbus
State Community College, Ahmad, 19, found herself floundering in something that
should have been mastered — algebra.
“I missed out a lot in
those two years,” Ahmad said. “If I had learned those skills in high school, I
feel like I would have been better equipped to do well in that class.”
Colleges are now
educating their first waves of students who experienced pandemic learning loss
in high school. What they are seeing is sobering, especially because the latest
dismal results from the US national exam of fourth and eighth graders suggest
that they could face year after year of incoming students struggling to catch
up. In almost all US states, there were significant declines in eighth-grade
math, and most states also showed a dip in reading for fourth and eighth
graders.
In interviews across
the country, undergraduates discussed how their disjointed high school
experiences have trailed them in their first years of college; some professors
talked about how grades are down, as well as standards. Many students are
tentative and anxious.
For many low-income
students and students of color, who have historically faced bigger obstacles to
earning a degree, classes seem to be that much harder and graduating that much
tougher.
As it is, in many
states, high school graduation rates fell for the class of 2021. And
undergraduate enrollment has declined 4.2 percent since 2020, according to
preliminary data published recently by the National Student Clearinghouse
Research Center.
Community colleges,
facing precipitous drops among
Black and Hispanic students, have struggled over
the past two years to bring students back to the classroom.
The swirl of issues
“all demonstrate that we’ve got a crisis”, said Stanley Litow, a visiting
professor of public policy at Duke University and a former deputy chancellor of
the New York City public schools.
It is especially bad,
he said, for low-income students and students of color. “The population that
we’re most interested in doing the most for seems to be moving in the wrong
direction,” he said.
Benedict College, a
historically Black college in Columbia, South Carolina, is facing that reality.
First-year enrollment there, which typically hovers around 700 students, was
halved in the fall of 2020 and rebounded to just under 600 last fall, said the
college president, Roslyn Clark Artis. But this term, administrators were
stunned to see an enrollment of just 378, which Artis attributed to students’
concerns about the economy.
Most students were
high school sophomores when COVID hit, and they arrived with lower ACT scores
than in previous years. The college has seen “significant remediation needs” in
math, Artis said.
“We are now
two-and-a-half weeks past midterm, and our grades are telling the tale:
students are struggling in math,” she said.
In math departments
across the country, professors and administrators say more students need more
support. Professors talked of whittling their syllabuses and lowering their
expectations.
Lee DeVille, a math
professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he “triaged”
a class this past spring to focus on fundamentals. It pained him, he said, to
cut out some “beautiful mathematics”, but it seemed necessary.
“They came in with a
little bit less, and they probably came out with a little bit less,” he said.
At Texas A&M
University, some math classes saw higher rates of Ds, Fs, as well as more
withdrawals, over the course of the pandemic. The problems have been
particularly bad for first-year students, said Paulo Lima-Filho, the executive
director of the university’s math learning center, which provides tutoring.
Students of all kinds
seemed to lack sharp foundational math skills and rigorous study habits, he
said. And some students had flawed understandings of basic concepts, which
particularly worried him.
“That gap will
propagate through the generation of the cohort,” Dr Lima-Filho said. “Colleges
are going to have to make an extra effort to bridge that gap.”
Nick Sullivan, a
sophomore at A&M, took a hybrid calculus course at his high school in
Belton, Texas. Students learned primarily from videos, with supplementary
in-person instruction, a style that “did not work at all for me”, he said.
Still, Sullivan had
hoped last year that the class would give him an advantage in college calculus.
But he found that nearly nothing carried over, he said, and that “I actually
thought the wrong things.”
An engaging professor
and help from the math center have helped him make up for the lost time, he
said, and he is now majoring in nuclear engineering.
In college writing and
literature courses, instructors say they have seen fewer issues with student
readiness. But many pointed to other concerns, including higher levels of
anxiety and a reduced willingness to find support.
At Auburn University’s
writing center, first-year students historically made up about 30 percent of
those seeking help — “the single biggest constituency that we’ve served”, said
Christopher Basgier, the director of university writing.
That has dropped to 20
percent. “It may be that because they spent more time learning from home, they
aren’t used to going out and seeking that kind of extra help,” he said.
The big risk for
students is taking more time, and perhaps more money, on earning a degree — or
not getting one at all.
At Benedict, which
serves many low-income, first-generation students, the pandemic has made it
even harder to ensure that students graduate on time, Artis said. The college’s
six-year graduation rate in 2021-22 stood at 25 percent, according to data from
the US Department of Education.
The college has
“doubled down” on providing resources to students who are considering
withdrawing from classes, she said. And despite the low graduation rates, she
said the college is right to push ahead.
“We are committed to
populations for whom disenfranchisement is common,” Artis said. “We’ve always
accepted that sort of burden, despite the black eye that everybody seems to
give us for our inability to push the kid — whose experience has been anything
but traditional — out in a four-year traditional time frame.”
The long tail of the
pandemic can also be felt in the mental health of adolescents, for whom rates
of anxiety, depression, and suicide have increased.
Artis said that she
has observed a shift among students who spent the last years of their high
school education primarily online. Those students seem more reserved, she said,
less eager to engage in large group activities. The college’s football team is
undefeated for the first time in its history, but student attendance at games
is down.
“We have had students
— for the first time in my 10 years as a college president — say to me, ‘Do we
have to attend the parties?’” she said. “There’s almost anxiety associated with
coming back into a social setting.”
At the University of
Oregon, many students harbored a “level of apathy” toward college, said Amy
Hughes-Giard, an assistant vice provost focused on supporting new students.
“They want to connect,
but they’re unsure,” she said.
Clutch Anderson was a
first-year student at the
University of Oregon when COVID-19 torpedoed his
college experience. Anderson, 21, an art and technology major, said he found it
difficult to establish routines. During his sophomore year, his classes were
remote and he barely left his off-campus apartment. He fell into a depression.
“I had no motivation
and couldn’t get anything done in my classes,” he said. Now as a senior, he
added, “I’m still trying to get out of that space.”
Hughes-Giard said the university is trying to instill
a sense of belonging, by staging events and creating places to relax. But for
the students who are the most behind, she worries that the pandemic’s effects
are not going away soon. Even today, they often have other burdens, like
working extra jobs to feed themselves and support their families.
“We’re always trying to slim that gap,” she said. “But
it feels like we hit the wide-open mouth of the river again.”
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