Jazeba Ahmad was a junior in high school when Covid-19 hit and her maths education faltered.

Ahmad was enrolled in an international baccalaureate maths class intended to provide a strong foundation in areas like algebra, geometry, statistics and calculus. But her high school in Columbus, Ohio, US, made a rocky transition to remote learning, she said, and soon, maths 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 national exam of fourth and eighth graders suggest that they could face year after year of incoming students struggling to catch up.

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 colour, who have historically faced bigger obstacles to earning a degree, classes seem to be that much harder and graduating that much tougher. Benedict College, a historically Black college in Columbia, South Carolina, US, is facing that reality.

First-year enrolment 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 enrolment 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. The college has seen “significant remediation needs” in maths, Artis said.

In maths departments across the US, professors say more students need more support. They talked of whittling their syllabuses and lowering their expectations. At Texas A&M University, some maths classes saw higher rates of Ds, Fs, as well as more withdrawals.

The problems have been particularly bad for first-year students, said Paulo Lima-Filho, the executive director of the university’s maths learning centre, which provides tutoring. Students of all kinds seemed to lack foundational maths skills and rigorous study habits. And some students had flawed understandings of basic concepts, which particularly worried him. Nick Sullivan, a sophomore at A&M, took a hybrid calculus course at his high school.

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 and that “I actually thought the wrong things”.

An engaging professor and the maths centre have helped him make up for the lost time, he said, and he is now majoring in nuclear engineering. At the writing centre of Auburn University in Alabama, US, first-year students historically made up about 30 per cent 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 per cent.

“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 per cent, 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. The long tail of the pandemic can also be felt in the mental health of adolescents. 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.

“We have had students — for the first time in my 10 years as a college president — say, ‘Do we have to attend the parties’?” she said.

“There’s anxiety associated with coming back into a social setting.”

Clutch Anderson was a first-year student at the University of Oregon, US, 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. Now, as a senior, “I’m still trying to get out of that space,” he said.

NYTNS