Students Who Finished High School During COVID Lockdowns Are Failing College

Students whose last two years of high school were marred by school lockdowns and online learning are now falling behind at college, the New York Times reports.

Members of the class of 2022, who were sophomores when the pandemic began, are struggling to keep up in their freshman college courses, feeling like they lost two years of education in high school. With the latest results from the Education Department showing a dismal decline in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores, universities fear that students struggling to catch up may be an ongoing trend among college freshmen.

Enrollment in undergraduate programs has fallen 4.2 percent since 2020, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., saw its first-year enrollment, which normally sits at about 700 students, drop to 378 this term. According to the school’s president, Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis, the college’s math department has particularly seen “significant remediation needs.”

“We are now two and a half weeks past midterm, and our grades are telling the tale: Students are struggling in math,” Artis told the Times.

The increase in students needing extra help to pass their classes has led professors and administrators across the country to dumb down their courses and look for better tutoring resources – READ MORE