College Professors Spill the Beans on What Pandemic Learning Did to Students

In a world scarred by the prolonged ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, the landscape of American higher education is changing in unsettling ways.

Professors and education experts are sounding the alarm over a decline in the academic preparedness and engagement of students, a phenomenon now backed by disconcerting data.

The situation isn’t merely anecdotal; it is a reality exposed by a bombshell report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at Arizona State University.

“Three years after the start of the pandemic, Covid-19 is continuing to derail learning, but in more insidious and hidden ways,” the report’s researchers noted, adding that “things are far from normal, even though students are back in school.”

Jonathan Malesic, a writing professor at Southern Methodist University with two decades of teaching under his belt, discussed the malaise he’s seen in classrooms.

“Students weren’t turning in homework, and when they were, they were turning in assignments really late,” Malesic informed The New York Post. “The quality of the work really had simmered.”

Malesic’s observations are no outlier but indicative of a broader trend that has even led to students dozing off in class or watching European soccer matches during lectures.

But this deterioration isn’t confined to the humanities. Lee DeVille, Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, offered a dismal account of how students are faring in math.

“The average student today is less able to place into a calculus or college algebra course,” DeVille said. He’s been teaching for 25 years and has never seen this level of unpreparedness.

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The CRPE report further validates these findings, stating that the average eighth grader is now 9.1 months — practically an academic year — behind in math.

Corroborating this alarming decline, the ACT organization has revealed that the average ACT score for the Class of 2023 stands at a meager 19.5 out of 36, marking the lowest in over 30 years.

Moreover, a staggering 42% of test-takers failed to meet benchmarks in any single subject area, showcasing what the ACT termed as a “decline in preparedness for college-level work.”

A survey by the Education Advisory Board found that 73% of high school counselors also agreed that the pandemic had severely impaired their students’ academic preparation.

Dr. Jenny Darroch, Dean of the Farmer School of Business at Miami University in Ohio, voiced concerns about the gap in job readiness for these students.

“We’re concerned we’re going to have to do even more with high-school graduates to get them up to where we know that employers want them to be,” said Darroch, who has spent three decades in higher education.

She has also noticed a decline in the emotional and psychological maturity of students, citing that the maturity level of a post-pandemic 18-year-old is approximately akin to a 14-year-old before the lockdowns.

Universities are now grappling with the challenge of not lowering academic standards while still accommodating students who are evidently lagging.

Darroch, for instance, is focusing on early interventions and expanded on-campus tutoring support. “We won’t lower the math requirement. We’re not going to graduate weaker students,” she said firmly.

As universities gear up to face these academic shortcomings head-on, they are doing so with the acknowledgment that Covid-19’s impact on the educational system will be a “sustained challenge,” as DeVille put it.

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