My son isn’t doing as well as he normally does in school. He’s just finishing up his sophomore year of high school. We live in a diverse zip code, that has had very high rates of Covid transmission since early on in the pandemic. He has type-1 diabetes. The good news is, as of last Friday, he’s two weeks since his second Pfizer shot. The bad is that it’s been 18 months since he was last in a classroom.
The online program this year can only be considered learning in extremely challenging circumstances. His school is using an online learning platform that the local community colleges won’t touch because of its difficulty. Due to the system, his grades have been essentially unknowable until the end of the semester – and unlike a normal school, I don’t get report cards every six weeks. Last week he was doing well. This week he’s getting two D’s. One was because his cell phone plan didn't properly auto-renew, so he couldn’t do a discussion-based assignment with his teacher. The other was for a big project that fell apart due to a poor description of what the teacher wanted. In both cases, he’s likely to be able to bring the grades up. I worry about kids whose parents aren’t keeping as close an eye on their grades. What happens when the kid whose parents are working two low wage jobs suddenly has a piece of electronics fail to work.
I got worried about what this year's grades might mean for college admissions. It seems like the bigger problem may be paying for it.
While talks NPR’s talks with admissions officers can seem relatively cheerful, it might be best to listen to folks who aren’t part of an institutional PR plan. This article from Inside Higher Ed gets to the heart of the matter:
Some colleges have issued reassuring announcements about accounting for grades affected by COVID-19. . . In other words, we understand distance learning may have messed with your GPA and will take that into account. Similarly, speaking for its highly selective brethren, Yale announced that “We also recognize that many students personal circumstances may make it especially difficult to achieve their typical academic level during this time. These considerations will also be part of our committee’s whole-person review.”
What does this mean in practice? Much less optimistically:
[T]hatdoesn’t mean that GPA will not be taken into account. The UC system will still require a minimum 3.0 for California resident admission(3.4 for nonresidents). And I haven’t found any indication that anyone has modified the strict GPA qualifications for financial aid. In other words, if you were a high-performing (3.75-4.0) student whose grades have fallen off, you’ll still get in, albeit probably with reduced financial aid. If you’re a pretty good student(3.0-3.75) whose grades have fallen off, you may not be admitted, and if you are, kiss the financial aid goodbye. California isn’t alone in this. Institutions across the country that may be willing to take grade declines into account for admissions have not adjusted financial aid requirements (for a variety of reasons, I know, but still …).
So you can get in (maybe), but you’re going to have to take out a huge chunk of student loans. And that’s if students don’t just give up.
Many students are struggling just to finish classes and haven’t taken the time to work on college applications. With the recurring immediate crises in their lives, college seems a long way off anyway, and the plunge in their grades, along with what they think that means for college admissions, has depressed them to the point that many are thinking, “Why bother?” One told me of two friends who decided to dump high school altogether; they were so far behind in their senior classes they could never catch up. And even those who will manage to struggle through to completing are pretty sure that they wont qualify for financial aid, without which college isn’t possible; many simply won’t apply.
The racial element of all of this is explosive. Who went back in person this year? White kids in conservative, often rural, districts. People of color, not so much. The media likes to say it because kids had to work to support their families. This might technically be known as a “lie that makes white people feel better about themselves.” Why did more BIPOC kids sit out this year – because Covid went through their communities like a brush fire and caused mass death as well as permanent disability. It doesn’t make sense for a sixteen-year-old to risk becoming a long hauler.
What’s coming is going to disadvantage minority and low-income students at least as much, if not more. Standardized testing was suspended this year. Georgia has already announced that they are returning to testing –and schools are likely to follow. Tests – and unreliable pandemic grades – are likely to be all most colleges have to go on for the near future. Picture what an admission officer is going to see next year. Students whose grades crash or stop halfway through their sophomore year. Extracurricular activities? Well, maybe they started something before the pandemic hit. The year after that, kids who did their sophomore year at home and are returning as juniors. Does anyone really think having a hundred kids in a band room blowing on wind-instruments is a good idea right now? These kids are going to have basically nothing to tell one apart from the other except for test scores.
We don’t even have a good handle on how bad things are going to get. There is a bunch of anecdotal evidence but the real damage isn’t going to be known until the end of the school year. We know a lot of kids are failing. How do we handle this? Our system pretty much writes kids off if they are held back a grade and the options for high schoolers who have to repeat a year is particularly abysmal. How many kids who have to repeat a year of high school end up getting offered undergrad scholarships? This is a looming affordability crisis on top of an educational crisis.