Recovering Higher Education During and After the Pandemic

The Digital And Physical Divide

Many low-income students underwent the pandemic-induced learning shift without access to the bare necessities that online learning requires: a reliable internet connection and a personal device. Students with unstable internet connections struggled to join class video calls and access resources on their school’s virtual learning platforms. Without the proper means to view, complete, or submit their schoolwork, students experienced difficulty understanding fundamental concepts and felt discouraged from participating in class. Meanwhile, students without any access to the internet/devices simply could not participate in any type of online learning environment. Many such students dropped out of higher education since they could no longer go to campus to access these essentials. While some schools and universities have been able to lend their students Chromebooks and temporary internet hotspots, many simply do not have the resources to do so. Concerningly, an analysis of data collected by the US Census Bureau reveals that in 2020, 4.4 million American households with school-aged students still lacked consistent access to a computer, and 3.7 million households lacked access to the internet (USAFacts, 2020). These appalling inequities exhibit the considerable disadvantages that low-income students faced in the transition to online learning. And while this socioeconomic divide in education was already present in the form of limited access to extracurriculars, tutoring programs, and updated technologies, the shift to a virtual environment exacerbated the learning divide by decreasing the accessibility of the most basic component of school: regular instruction-time. Since low-income students could neither hire private tutors nor attend expensive summer programs before the pandemic, they relied more heavily than other students on this basic instruction-time.

Predictably, the social and physical disconnect has had a devastating impact on students’ academic performances. Besides the constant distractions they face in online learning environments (while under little to no supervision), they also experience difficulty contacting their professors with questions and concerns. Whereas they could previously meet their professors between classes and attend in-person tutorials when falling behind in class, virtual “office hours” lack the organic nature of traditional student-teacher interaction, ultimately leading to a sizeable decrease in comprehension and an increasing amount of failing grades (Brinkley, 2020). Data collected from prominent high school districts across the nation exhibit an exponential increase in failing grades attributed to online learning, displaying failing rates that are as high as 40% in some districts (The Associated Press, 2020). Similar trends were observed in universities and institutes of higher education, and many colleges resorted to Pass/Fail grades in the 2019-2020 school year since grades had dropped concerningly below average. Naturally, students that were already struggling in their classes prior to the pandemic were impacted even more severely by the decrease in quality instruction time and student-teacher interactions.