Maria Thompson
Good afternoon. I’m Maria Thompson, Outreach Manager for the Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey. On behalf of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, welcome to the third and final Federal Reserve Community Development Research Seminar of our 2022 series, Toward an Inclusive Recovery. We’re excited to be joined by leaders from across the country to discuss short and long term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on K–12 education, higher education, and the future workforce. But before we get started, there’s one thing you will only hear from me, a disclaimer.
The views expressed during this event are those of the speakers and intended only for informational purposes. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors or the Federal Reserve System. With that out of the way, let’s start today’s program.
As I mentioned, this is the third installment of this year’s seminar series, which is designed to explore research, policy, and practice in the community development field. Our goal with the series is to expand access to high-quality research that informs stakeholders like you, working to support low- and moderate-income communities and communities of color. Our last few seminars have explored how the community development field, including the financial, government, philanthropic and non-profit sectors, could collectively advance policies and actions to support an inclusive and equitable recovery from the pandemic. And they are available to watch on demand at fedcommunities.org.
Over the course of the seminar, we would also like to hear from you. Please submit your questions using the Q&A feature with your video player. Additionally, join us on Twitter to continue today’s conversation by using #TowardInclusiveRecovery. It is now my honor to introduce Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman, to provide introductory remark. Governor Bowman, the floor is yours.
Michelle Bowman
Welcome and thank you for joining us to discuss topics important to the nation’s economy. This research seminar is part of the Federal Reserve’s series of events called Toward an Inclusive Recovery. Today’s seminar hosted by the Board of Governors will focus on how the pandemic affected education outcomes and the subsequent impact we anticipate for transitions to the labor force. We have invited accomplished researchers to discuss their work and what practical lessons might be drawn from it that could help inform community development practice and public policy considerations.
As I’m sure you are all aware, the pandemic created significant disruptions for our students and the education system. At the onset of the pandemic, steps taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 resulted in widespread closures of businesses and schools. Many, myself included, were immediately concerned about the negative effects on education from changes that included shifting to virtual instruction, lack of access to technology, and changes to the accessibility and provision of childcare.
It is critical to consider that access to education at every step along a student’s learning path serves as a pipeline into the labor force and enables future generations of Americans to participate and thrive in our dynamic labor market. The disruption of education throughout the pandemic undoubtedly led to an absence of workers in the labor force, creating a shortage which held back the early economic recovery. Education outcomes, including learning losses and achievements, take time to measure, aggregate, and analyze.
As we enter the fourth academic year affected by the pandemic, data on student performance is becoming more available. Much of this early data confirms our initial concerns. For example, early test scores show that throughout the country, nine year olds suffered a decline in learning outcomes during the pandemic. But other data also indicate that learning losses were unequal and disproportionately affected low-performing students and low-income students. It’s likely that the sudden shift to online classes contributed to the learning declines. According to the Board’s 2020 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, the SHED, only 22% of parents with children attending virtual classes agreed that their children learned as much as they would have attending classes in person at school. I hope that the return to in-person learning and reopening of schools will enable children to resume normal learning and that academic achievement will rebound.
It seems that even with this return to in-person attendance, many schools are struggling to provide students with the same quality of education as they did pre pandemic. With the return to onsite education, many schools are confronting challenges that impair their ability to meet the educational needs of students. A number of educators appear to have left the profession as indicated by the nearly 100,000 more job openings for teachers in July 2022 than before the pandemic. Complicating these issues across the country, the return to in-person instruction has been met by an increase in chronic absenteeism, which is defined as a student missing at least 10% of school days in a single school year. Compared to a typical school year pre pandemic, 72% of U.S. public schools reported an increase in chronic absenteeism among their students during the 2021–2022 school year, which is a 39% increase over the previous year.
Missed school typically means missed learning. So chronic absenteeism is a key metric of school performance. It’s likely that these challenges will result in lower graduation rates and possibly less stable employment than would otherwise have been the case. These outcomes raise difficult questions about how to best respond to the needs of students and educators going forward. For example, how can curricula be adjusted to meet students where they are today after nearly three years of pandemic-impacted learning? How can we best reengage the larger proportion of students who may have become disconnected as a result of these pandemic related disruptions to their education? What does all of this mean for the future of the labor force?
In addition to the challenges facing primary and secondary education, higher education was not immune to pandemic disruptions. Similar to K–12 education, studies also show that online instruction also reduced the academic performance of college students. In addition, we have seen declines in both college enrollment and the rate of first year college students who continue their education into a second year. These declines are most pronounced at community colleges and open access programs. Some of this decline was due to a supply induced shortage, resulting from colleges unable to offer remote learning options for many technical and vocational programs. The reduction in these hands-on programs such as air conditioning repair and auto detailing had a greater impact on male enrollment and may lead to labor supply shortages for some of these skills-based professions.
Education is the greatest and most effective input into the future of our labor market. In order to have the strongest possible labor force in the future, it is critical to understand and act immediately to address the educational losses that were experienced during the pandemic. I’m sure there’s much to learn about how these education challenges both long standing and more recent will ultimately affect the job market. That’s a question of particular concern and interest to policymakers, and it’s one of the most important reasons that we host events like this seminar.
I look forward to hearing from the experts we have invited here today to discuss ideas to successfully and quickly address academic declines, expand K–12 education options, improve higher education outcomes, and prepare this generation to participate and thrive in the future labor force. I hope that the research presented today is useful to you in your work. Community development professionals in our audience may consider how the design and implementation of their services can be enhanced and researchers may encounter ideas that spark new ideas for new work that can shed further light on these important topics. Thank you so much for joining us.
Maria Thompson
Thank you, Governor Bowman. Now, I would like to turn the program over to Lanae Erickson, Senior Vice President for Social Policy, Education, and Politics at Third Way. Lanae is our moderator for today’s program. Lanae, the floor is yours when you’re ready.
Lanae Erickson
Thank you so much. So great to see everybody here today. My name is Lanae Erickson. I am a Senior Vice president at a center-left think tank in Washington DC called Third Way, and I spend a lot of my time trying to understand how we can improve student outcomes in education K–12 and higher education and beyond. And we know that COVID has set us back in that endeavor, but also that it has given us a moment to potentially rethink how we do improve student outcomes across the education system, how we can use this inflection point to make our higher education system and our K–12 system better for all students across demographics and how we can make sure that it better serves the labor market and the American society at large.
So in order to do that, we have esteemed panel of academics that are going to share some of the facts on the ground with us, and then we’re going to talk a little bit about what policymakers might need to do in order to address these issues moving forward.
First, I am excited to welcome Gema Zamarro, who is a Professor of Education Reform and Economics at University of Arkansas, and she’s going to talk to us a little bit about the impact of COVID on student achievement and achievement gaps, as well as the impact on the teacher labor market. So Gema, take it away.
Gema Zamarro
Thank you so much. Let me share my slides. Thank you so much for having me here today. I will start saying what we have been already commented that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a big impact in a student’s academic achievement. Here we have the National Assessment of Education Progress scores for nine year olds, and we see unprecedented declines in the last two years that basically have wipe out progress that we have had for the last two decades. So the situation is really serious. It has really affected students, but most importantly, it’s also important to notice that it had not affected all the students equally. We see that students that were low performing and students from minorities backgrounds have been hit harder. And as a result, what we are observing is increasing widening gaps by race and by school poverty.
The prolonged school closures and remote and hybrid instruction appear to be a primary driver of this observed increasing gaps. And the fact is that not all kids have had the same learning experiences during the pandemic. So we see that at the beginning of the pandemic, although a majority of parents, 69% nationally were having their kids attending either remote or hybrid, we still see big differences by race, with Black families and Hispanic families’ kids attending much more remote or hybrid than white parents.
We also see that the COVID-19 pandemic has been hitting hard also teachers. We are observing at the beginning of the pandemic, teachers levels of stress and burnout that have been pretty high during these times, and that raise a lot of concerns about the potential increase in teacher turnover and future teacher shortages. Although, we have not seen the mass… So those of teachers that some were worried about at the beginning of the pandemic, we now have several reports from states that saw that during the first school year of the pandemic, teacher turnover was stable, but there has been an increase in the second year of the pandemic in teacher turnover of about two percentage points. And we also serve documented shortages in certain type of teachers. So we are missing a lot of teachers with special education licenses, or language teachers. And also in certain types of schools, rural schools, school serving more disadvantaged students report a higher shortages. And also we have documented shortages for teachers substitutes, teacher aids, and some school personnel like bus drivers.
So I think that moving forward, we will need to address these searches. We will need to find ways to recruit and retain high quality teachers and ways to accelerate learning to really close these gaps that have come because of the pandemic. Thank you.
Lanae Erickson
Thank you so much, Gema. That was a great start. Next, I’m going to hand it over to Diane Schanzenbach, the Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, who’s going to talk a little bit about the impact that COVID had on students more broadly on attendance, on mental health, hunger, and other challenges, as well as the investments that we have made over time to deal with those challenges and what that future money flow might look like if we do head towards a recession. Diane, take it away.
Diane Schanzenbach
Thank you so much. We’re still trying to understand the effects of COVID on children’s education and their development. And as Gema described, to no one’s surprise, there have been a substantial drop in both math and reading achievement. Every single demographic group has been hurt and the drops are even larger in high poverty schools, among Black, Hispanic, American Indian, and Alaska Native students. Declines are also larger in schools where more of the 2020 and 2021 school years were done by remote instruction. Indeed, according to recent research from a team including Tom Kane at Harvard, high poverty schools that were remote for more than half of that school year, lost nearly a half of standard deviation in student achievement. That’s equivalent to 22 weeks worth of instruction.
This slide that I’m showing, shows evidence from math growth assessments from the firm NWEA that are given to about 25,000 public schools students across the nation. A drawback of these data relative to the NAEP scores that Gema showed is that they’re not necessarily a representative, however, they are given to large and consistent samples over time. Because math tests are typically given in the fall and the spring, they allow us to track growth over the course of the school year. So this graph from NWA shows math test scores following children over time as they progress from the fall of second grade through the spring of fifth grade, and comparing the current cohort of children to a cohort that passed through these same grades prior to the pandemic.
First, usually, students math scores grow over the course of the year, which of course is what we pay for. Then they diminish somewhat during the summer vacation and then grow again during the next academic year. This is the pattern followed by both cohorts of students from the fall of grade two through the fall of grade three, as highlighted here in the purple box.
Now, for the most recent cohort, COVID hit in the winter of their third grade year. By the fall of fourth grade, they had fallen about a sixth of a standard deviation behind a pre-COVID cohort that’s comparable. That’s a loss of about eight weeks of learning. But by the end of that year, that year with a lot of variation across schools in terms of how much in-person learning occurred, on average, they had cumulatively lost more than a quarter of a standard deviation in terms of math course. That’s about 14 weeks of learning. Now the good news is that some fraction of this loss was recovered last year. While the COVID cohort of fifth graders are still scoring worse than the comparison group, by the end of the year, they were the equivalent of 11 weeks of learning behind the pre-COVID cohort, down from a peak of 14 weeks. Now, if we can keep up this rate of progress for these kids, and that’s a big if, it’ll take three to five years-
Diane Schanzenbach
And that’s a big if. It’ll take three to five years to get them back to their pre pandemic trajectory. Now, unfortunately, so far the progress toward recovery varies widely across grade levels. The same exercise following older children from fourth to seventh grade or from fifth to eighth grade, shows little to no progress in regaining the learning loss. Now, we also know that there are other important social, behavioral, and emotional skills that are important for lifetime success but aren’t directly measured in math and reading test scores. These social, behavioral and emotional skills are nurtured and taught in schools as well as at home and in extracurricular activities. These show up in measures such as persistence and the ability to work together in groups, attendance and graduation rates among others. Now, these skills are important in their own right and also feedback into academic achievement. At this point, we know less systematically about the damage done to children during COVID along these dimensions and how we can regain the lost ground.
This lack of systematic evidence is partially just due to difficulties in measurement, but there are widespread reports of low attendance rates, diminished mental health and diminished socialization and other worrying trends. This graph on the screen shows results from a survey of parents of school children was conducted by McKenzie. The good news, as you compare the gold bars to the green ones, is that parents have become less worried about their children as things have returned to a post pandemic normal. The share of parents reporting that they’re extremely or very concerned about their children’s academic performance, their school engagement and their mental health dropped from spring to fall last year. But the bad news is that concerns are still substantially higher than they were prior to the pandemic. Comparing the blue and green bars, across the board, these are up between five and seven percentage points depending on the domain.
Now, it’s in our economic interest to do what we can to remediate the academic developmental damage done to children during the pandemic. Work by economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann estimate that the damage to test scores that has already been done will result in loss productivity to the United States economy on the order of $14 trillion over the next decades. Now the good news here is that COVID relief funds are being spent to mitigate learning losses. According to Future Ed at Georgetown, more than half of districts and charter schools surveyed plan to spend COVID relief money on opportunities to expand learning, through summer learning, afterschool programs, weekend classes or extended calendars. Many schools also report spending on tutoring and structural materials and assessments. Now all of these approaches have substantial evidence behind them, supporting their potential to boost learning in the direction of recovering. But in all honesty, we don’t have any tools in our toolkit that can close a gap of the magnitudes that we’ve seen in just one or two years.
It’s going to take sustained effort over many years to remediate the damage, especially in places that experience the most profound learning losses. I am concerned that our collective will to remediate the damage will falter before we reach the finish line. And I’m especially concerned about this if we in fact dip into another recession. It will take sustained additional resources, both financial and human, to reverse the damage done to children’s education and development during COVID. So I’ll end my remarks with the advice for parents and communities to hold elected officials, school superintendents and school board members accountable for whether they continue to make steady progress and eventually succeed in remediating the academic damage that’s been done to children during this time period. Thank you.
Lanae Erickson
Thank you so much, Diane. That was very helpful. And now let’s turn to some remarks and insights about how COVID has impacted our higher education system. And for that, I would like to bring to the stage Celeste Carruthers, who is the William F. Fox distinguished professor of labor economics in the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And she’s going to share with us some information about falling college enrollment and the impact that that has on the economy, both within higher education and beyond. So Celeste, I’ll turn it over to you.
Celeste Carruthers
Thank you. All right. As Governor Bowman mentioned in her opening remarks, there are a lot fewer students in college than there were prior to the pandemic. So between fall 2019 and fall 2021, college enrollment overall has fallen about 5%, fallen 13% in community colleges. Although the slide in community colleges was softened a bit last year as enrollment partially rebounded among older students. And it’s too soon to know if enrollment this year has continued to fall or has started to tick back up.
To zoom in on one state, after Tennessee introduced tuition free community and technical college in 2015, the percent of high school graduates going straight to college jumped up 10% or six percentage points. And over the next few high school cohorts after that initial year of Tennessee Promise, the college going rate tapered and declined a little, but then really sank to levels that have not been seen since the state started collecting these data over 10 years ago. Now, just over 52% of high school graduates in Tennessee are going straight to college. So what might be going on here? There’s no mono causal explanation because the different phases of the pandemic have offered a lot of different challenges and opportunities to students, to would be students and to workers. To some extent, this may be a continuation of pre-COVID trends. College enrollment was declining, albeit not quite as steeply prior to COVID.
Diane Schanzenbach, who’s here, and Sarah Turner showed that capacity constraints at community colleges explained part of the sharp drop in college enrollment in 2020, specifically enrollments in assembly, maintenance and repair fields. The decline in those fields explained a lot of the overall community college enrollment decline, including among men. So those are the same fields where capacity constraints from social distancing and other limitations necessary during the pandemic would’ve limited in-person learning. Some students may have been averse to taking classes online or might not have been able to access the technology necessary to do that seamlessly. Other students may have been opposed to taking on the health risks of going to class in person or in hybrid formats.
For students with families, online K–12 education as well as inconsistent child care that lasts to this day present a lot of logistical challenges to enrolling in college and succeeding in college. Also continuing to this day, a very tight labor market presents an appealing option to college for some students. So focusing on young adults, the likelihood of working in a job paid a wage or salary steadily increased over the long economic expansion following the great Recession. And at the same time, the likelihood of enrolling in post-secondary education slightly softened and fell over that time period. And then in the most recent economic expansion, the quick and very steep expansion following the onset of the pandemic, work among this population rebounded partially and college enrollment continued to slide.
There have been more job openings than job seekers since summer 2021. This is pushing wages up. Prices and inflation are rising at the same time, but rising pay is outpacing inflation at lower levels of the pay scale in jobs that are less likely to require college. I’ll note here that college or work is not a binary decision. A lot of students, including two thirds of Tennessee community college students prior to the pandemic, had work. They had employer relationships, they had a preexisting attachment to the labor market or a need to work while they were enrolled.
So what does this mean for the labor market going forward? The stands are shifting very fast. The labor market, the economy continues to evolve. And so the big picture takeaway should be that we’re not quite certain what this will mean and when it will mean for the labor market, but here’s some lightly informed speculation about what we can expect. We can expect some lasting effects of online learning in both K–12 and in college. We’ve got enough work showing that online learning was less effective than in person learning where that was available. Probably more effective than completely closing schools, but a suboptimal way of going to school than in person. In the very short term, we can expect fewer college educated workers in the labor force, although again, it’s not quite clear what’s happening this current academic year or if the college enrollments will rebound back to their level or trend where they were prior.
And I’m really sympathetic to the students or the would be students who chose work over school when they saw pay rising and job opportunities opening up. And particularly in 2020 when they saw a lot of online classes. Nevertheless, this may leave them more vulnerable to recessions and to automation in the future, which tend to affect jobs with lower education requirements more potently. So that being said, to the extent that the labor market tightness is lasting, this may lead more employers to reevaluate those same education requirements or to incorporate more education into the workplace through micro credentials and badges, various different firm specific training opportunities or sector specific training opportunities run by non-profits or other partners, in addition to employer provided tuition benefits for workers. In the short and long term, we may have more non-traditional and returning students. And another ongoing trend continuing with pre-COVID sentiments about college and work will be continued interest in education that has relevance for the workplace through career and tech ed in K–12 as well as student’s major choices in college. Thank you.
Lanae Erickson
Thank you so much Celeste. And for our last presentation, I’d love to turn the stage over to Raj Darolia who is the Wendell H Ford professor of Public Policy at the Public Policy and Economics School at the University of Kentucky. And he studies a variety of things, but is going to talk to us today about the impact of COVID on higher education’s finance, for schools, for states, and then obviously how that trickles down to students. So Raj, take it away.
Rajeev Darolia
Great, thanks Lanae. And thanks to the group for having me today. So I’m going to be talking about some consequences of the pandemic for a handful of topics within post-secondary finance. There’s going to be kind of two main themes that will spread across the things that I’ll be talking about. One is that a lot of the issues that have really hurt institutions and students related to post-secondary finance and the pandemic were already simmering before the pandemic hit. And so some people will say that this is just really accelerating issues that we’ve already seen in the past.
And then the other thing is that when we think about both how the pandemic affected students and institutions and also recovery from that going forward, it’s really going to be distinct depending on the type of student. And so what we’re going to see is that we expect the impact and also the recovery to really follow what we might think of as like a K shaped recovery where those who were already advantaged have a lot of advantage that will accelerate their recovery out of the pandemic. And those that weren’t will continue to have further struggles.
So first, let’s talk about institutional financial health. And so as I already mentioned, a lot of the issues related to financial health for institutions, post-secondary institutions were already present before the pandemic started. So you can think about that as smaller high school cohorts. Questions about the value of higher ed, institutions needing to discount tuition rates at high rates, households and their students in their households having reduced ability to pay and just generally less public financial support relative to the prices that institutions charge. So the COVID pandemic certainly accelerated many of these crises, but as I mentioned, one way we can think about is that the rich got richer and the distressed continued to face increasing challenges. Part of this is because when we think about the supports that were provided during the pandemic, they really were helpful in keeping state higher education budgets and institutions afloat.
So we have examples like stimulus funds, which is what most people think about when we think about pandemic supports. But other conditions also really advantage certain advantage institutions. So for example, low costs of credit. So institutions with better credit profiles were able to finance a lot of their data at very low rates, or there were kind of soaring endowments over this time period as well. But to take advantage of that, that really was something that was restricted to those institutions with really strong endowments. So we can think about this, as we come out of the pandemic, for institutions that already had a lot of advantage, again, strong credit, ability to recruit students, large endowments, they weren’t actually hurt as much as we might think. But for other less advantaged institutions, these kind of stimulus funds and other supports were really helpful in keeping institutions afloat and helping students persist.
But this is less likely to abate persistent trends that are going on. And so I’ll just mention one prediction about revenue by one of the organizers of this session, Doug Weber. Him and his co-authors, they estimated revenue loss by different institution type. And the main takeaway that I derive from their work is really that the large sort of selective, especially publics and privates that already had big robust student bodies, they’re going to get hurt a little bit from the pandemic, but not nearly as much as smaller institutions, HBCUs and some minority serving institutions. So just to illustrate this a little bit further, this is a graph from a Seattle Times Journal, or sorry, news article, where they show that from 2019 to 2021 in the state of Washington, enrollment across all the institutions dropped 7%. But if you look at the flagship, sort of the most selective institution, public institution in the state, they actually stayed about flat, maybe even a very small increase in students. But there was a loss of enrollment of up to 30% at some of the less selective, less elite institutions.
So what you can really see here is that it puts a lot of financial pressures, especially on certain institutions. Turning now to state appropriations for higher education. One thing that was unique about the pandemic, I’m going to direct you to kind of the top right corner of the slide first, is when we had prior downturns, we saw sort of this phenomenon where enrollment would increase as the job market, the labor market was looser and students were trying to reskill. That led to an increase in tuition revenue. And because economic conditions were bad, state funding declined. We actually saw the opposite of that in this pandemic. So enrollment declined, tuition revenue declined, but there was actually a lot of support in state funding. And I think that’s obviously part of the story as to why maybe in higher ed, at least for institutions, the pandemic wasn’t as damaging as it could have been.
So just looking at the overall trend here, since 2012, we’ve seen appropriations from state levels. This is an aggregate and there’s a lot of variation across states, both in total and per student increase since 2012. Now this is still lower than it was in the pre 2001 or pre 2008 recession levels. And the other thing that has happened in recent years is that we see that the share of higher ed funding has started to shift somewhat from general operating allocations to institutions to more of it going to students directly in the form of different types of aid program. This actually can have some implications for equity in a long sort of K shaped recovery that I mentioned before. So in many ways, this is great because it gives students more choice of where they want to go. But this is really going to then benefit and probably drive more students to institutions which have the best reputations or the biggest ability to attract students.And so that can have both positive implications for those institutions, but also leave institutions with less ability to recruit students in some struggles. And then I also want to mention just a couple bullet points related to student loan borrower and student financial wellbeing. So this is kind of enabled by some really good work that folks, for example, Trellis Research, but also the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and New York CFPB have been doing to really try to understand using surveys the plights of students and student borrowers. And so couple takeaways I want to convey here. So obviously students and student loan borrowers face many financial challenges, but not all of them are directly education related. So an example of this, Celeste already mentioned that most students work while they’re in college. And a lot of students work because they need to work in order to afford college expenses.
So not only were education issues affected by the pandemic, but so was employment. So if a student needed to work to be able to pay further college expenses and they lost their job, this could be incredibly problematic obviously. And so in the Trellis work, they reported among their survey respondents, 20 to 25% of students had some sort of involuntary unemployment. And based on some of the federal reserve surveys, about half of student loan borrowers reported some employment or income disruptions. As you might expect, kind of deteriorating household financial circumstances were worse among certain groups, including first gen students and parents of children. I’ll kind of speed up here just because I’m running out of time. But two other points I want to talk about here is the one, it wasn’t just directly educational stimulus that affected college students. Certainly some of the higher ed emergency funds were very helpful in this, but a lot of students report getting medical assistance, food assistance, unemployment insurance, childcare assistance.
And again, those that are more likely to report this are groups that are traditionally disadvantaged by our higher education systems. And finally, I’ll mention something from some of the student loan reports, and this is about differential financial resiliency. The strongest predictor from some of these surveys of expecting to have troubles with post pandemic of student loan repayment challenges were really having struggles pre pandemic. And so we can think about this is that, again, a lot of these issues were present before the pandemic and it’s some of those same groups that need assistance as we move forward. So I’ll stop there and turn it back over to Lanae.
Lanae Erickson
Thank you so much Raj. And at this point, we are going to end the PowerPoints and have a conversation. So as we start to think about what policy implications are of what has just been shared by these smart researchers, I want to invite you all to ask questions. Please participate in the chat, start writing your questions now. And we are going to start with me and one other policy focused person talking about what are the lessons that we should learn from all of this information and what policymakers should do in order to address these challenges. And then we’re going to have a conversation with you all with some questions from the audience.
So please start to populate those questions now. And I will start with some reflections on what we’ve just heard. I think that on the K–12 front, it is very clear that if there is, and let’s hope not, but if there is another pandemic that we face, we need to better balance the interests of public health, but also the knowledge that school closures really drive learning losses and particularly learning losses with certain groups of students who frankly can afford them the least.
So I think we need to do a better job of thinking about how to balance those two things moving forward. Obviously this was a unique situation and everyone was doing the best they can, but we have to do it better next time because these losses are really so impactful. I think we also need to think more about how we are recruiting and retaining good teachers and also support staff. We had had a preexisting challenge with the fact that support staff and teachers were populations that were graying in the workforce. We saw older folks who were nearing the age of retirement not being replaced at the same level by younger folks coming into the profession. And that is going to be an ongoing challenge for policy makers, particularly as we heard in rural areas, in areas of greatest need. And it’s a place that I think we really need some policy intervention.
And then third, on the K–12 front, if you ask folks in Washington, they want to say that COVID is over. I think we all want to say that COVID is over, but it is clear from what we have seen here that the challenges are not over. And Diane’s point about the investment that is going to be needed both financially and through human resources in a sustained way over a period of many years moving forward to recover from the losses that we’ve seen here and the challenges that folks are still grappling with, I just worry that we’re not going to have the political attention span and willingness to really make those investments. So it is incumbent on all of us to make…
Lanae Erickson
We make those investments. So it’s incumbent on all of us to make the case that the pandemic itself may be moving into a different stage, but that does not mean that it’s over. It does not mean that this investment that we’ve made, can simply go away and we all go back to normal and everything will be fine.
On the higher education front, a couple of things struck me. The first is just thinking about student outcomes to start. So much of our policy within higher education has been focused on access, just getting students into college. And once they’re in, we figure everything’s fine, they’re going to be fine, and we know that’s not true. And one opportunity that this pandemic may have offered to us, is the ability to step back and say, how are we serving students in our higher education system? And how must we do it better in order to make sure that they are set up to succeed in the labor market and succeed in our economy moving forward?
The second piece that really struck me in the academics presentations was the differential impact on different kinds of institutions. And we often talk about higher education as a marketplace. Unlike K–12, we think there’s a lot of consumer choice and students can go wherever they’d like, and we give them grants and loans that they can use that are equal no matter where they attend, whether they attend Harvard or their local community college, their Pell Grant is the same. I think we really need to turn that on its head, based on what we’ve seen here, both preexisting but now worsening in the pandemic.
There are certain schools and kinds of schools, community colleges, minority serving institutions that are under-resourced, that really are the ones that are doing the bulk of the work to provide economic mobility to students across the country. And yet we don’t reward them at all for that. They don’t have huge endowments. They have these student populations that might need more resources in order to succeed. And I think we really need to think about creating something akin to Title 1 in our K–12 system, where we invest more in the schools that we know need more resources and think about investing more in those colleges that are doing the yeoman’s work of putting people on a track to economic success.
Two other thoughts about the higher education implications here. One is online learning. So many schools and programs are now experiencing moving to online and trying to figure out how much they should stay online versus in person. And I think we need to be really thoughtful about both providing the flexibility that online learning might provide, but also making sure that we don’t overly rely on it, when we know that certain groups of students have been pretty poorly served by online programs all the way through their educational career. So we really need to keep an eye on these online programs that we know schools and programs may use as a cash cow. They can scale them very quickly, but are they truly serving students in the way we need them to, especially knowing that we’re funding them with taxpayer dollars.
And then finally, before I turn it over to Nat, I just want to mention the kind of through line here to me, is that students are people. They’re experiencing, we talk about them as students, we talk about them as receiving just the higher education subsidies, but really we’re talking about people who have jobs, people who have children, people who have needs well beyond what’s happening at school. And so often policy makers rely on an assumption that students are 18 to 22, they’re going to higher education immediately after graduating high school, and they’re then relatively set up for the rest of their lives.
But that is not the picture of today’s higher education students. We really have, in fact, the majority of folks attending higher education in this country, do not fit into that category. So policy makers are going to have to think about students in a more wholesale way and recognize that serving them means serving them as a whole and not just in terms of their higher education.
So with those thoughts, I am going to turn it over to Nat Malkus, who is the senior fellow and Deputy Director of Education policy at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute. He and I very frequently talk about a higher education and K–12 policy in Washington DC and so he may have some different perspectives. So Nat, I’ll turn it over to you.
Nat Malkus
Thanks, Lanae. And this is a great panel so far and I’m really happy to be here. We’ve tackled some pretty big issues, and quickly. One thing I want to note is that much of what we know now is seen through a glass darkly, and that’s because we have some pretty serious data vacuums. I do much of my work, the majority of my work in K–12, and have actually spent much of the past couple of years just gathering and collecting data.
Now, part of the reason we’ve had a data vacuum in K–12 is a lot of the test stores that we rely on, these were canceled in spring 2020, and then they were optional last year. So we’re really waiting for some decent, large scale data from last spring. But part of this is a policy failure and that’s capturing valuable data about what was going on during the pandemic. So I’m log rolling a little bit here, because that is some of the data that I collected here at AEI, but I think that says something.
We set up a return to learn tracker, where we tracked weekly district’s status, whether they were offering in-person instruction to students, or fully remote, or were somewhere in between in a hybrid setting, and we measured that weekly for the 2020-2021 school year when so many extended closures were occurring. And I will say when we set that up, we expected to be put out of business. We’re not the top flight data collection enterprises out here, and we never were. We ended up with arguably, the best data on district closures in the nation. You can see that at returntolearntracker.net. But more importantly, this was not the only case. In higher education, the college crisis initiative run by Chris Marsicano out of Davidson College had some of the best data on college closures.
So I think it’s important to understand that we have a limited amount of data about what actually went on. And even on those levels, we only have institutional, or school district level data on who was closed when. And so we don’t have good measures about what actually caused these losses. That matters, because we do know even from through the glass darkly data that we have, that instructional options did matter, right?
Gema presented some data. There was a quote there by Dan Goldhaber, I believe that said, Look, the extended periods of remote time were a big driver of these learning losses. And we know that, but they were not only big drivers of learning losses, they were big drivers of enrollment differences across districts. And I don’t think that we need to bring this for, you don’t have to bring it to the point of re-litigating the closure debates that we had, although you could also argue that there’s some litigation due there, but I don’t think that we can ignore them. Look, this was the driver of much of the aftermath, the consequences, that we’re going to see in K–12 education and that we’re going to be dealing with for a long period of time.
So, even as Tom Kane who’s dealt with this stuff has said, look, you can look at these school closures as a bill that we paid for public health measures, or extended public health measures that some districts took, but the important thing is not to ignore that bill. It needs to be paid and not be put on the back for students.
So as far as returning to normal, I also think that it’s important what time span we viewed these things in. And in K–12, a lot of the things that we were measuring were district closures, and then we measured masking and things like that last year. But from the surface level, the observational, district level characteristics made it look like schools were back to normal. But when we look underneath that at some survey data, we see pretty strong indications that last year schools were not back to normal. If you look from last May, the IES school pulse panel data showed that when it comes to chronic absenteeism, classroom disruptions, teacher absenteeism and finding replacements for teachers, students academic achievement on all these things, schools said yes, they’re worse because of the pandemic, and sizable percentages of them said they’re worse this year than last year than the year of school closures.
So I think it’s not safe for us to think, well, we’re in a full scale rebuilding mode right now. I think a lot of the things that we are working on to get to recovery are relearning the grammar of schooling, the habits of schooling that produce these things. Now in my circles, you hear some happy talk from the folks that want to say, well, we should reinvent schooling. This is an opportunity to remit schooling. And other folks like Tom Kane that I mentioned will say, look, returning to normal is not enough. We need to do better to get this recovery. And while I agree with some of the sentiments about those, I do think that returning to normal, or at least some proximal status like pre pandemic normality, is necessary, but not sufficient for what we need to do. And I think that a lot of schools, districts and policy environments need to look to that.
And lastly, I’ll just say on the recovery, I think the one slide Gema put up, and Lanae mentioned this as well, and Raj mentioned the similar parts in the K shape recovery, this is not an even set of consequences. These have hit disadvantaged groups disproportionately. They’re going to have a harder time recovering, and part of that is that many of those disadvantaged groups were in places, at least in the K–12 world, where closures were longer. And not only that, but the work by Goldhaber and Kane has shown us that not only did they get a higher dose, but they suffered disproportionately worse per dose. So there’s sort of a double down effect.
The last thing I’ll say is, again, on the K–12 level, for once we have the money, Congress sent out $190 billion to school districts for recovery efforts. There’s a short clock on that. It needs to be decided how to be spent in less than a year, or in less than two years rather, by 2024. And that’s $190 billion on top of a $700 billion annual current operating expenditures. So that is quite a deal of money. I think that what is important here is that, again, we’re seeing through a glass darkly here. We don’t don’t know how much of that has been spent, and we certainly don’t have a very good idea of what it’s being spent on. And that means that we’re leaning really heavily on 13,000 different school districts to use those funds appropriately to identify the students that are most in need of help, to target interventions to them and convince them that you need to engage in these interventions. And that, I think, is the path to recovery.
And I am worried. That is a tough job. By no means should that be dismissed as easy, but there’s not the guardrails that I’d like to see around that to give us some assurance that the recovery is going to happen as well as it could, given the resources that we’ve committed to it. And Lanae, I think I will leave it there.
Lanae Erickson
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Nat. And I would like to take this moment to invite all of our wonderful panelists back to the stage virtually, and also to invite you all to start populating those questions, if you haven’t already. We have about 25 minutes to have a good conversation with these folks, and we want to make it as useful to you all as humanly possible.
So I’m going to take the moderator’s privilege of asking the first question, and I’d like to get an answer from all five of you actually. And I think this question is, if you had a magic wand and you got to make one policy change, you could just wave your wand and make it to address the state of our education system and the future of our workforce in this post COVID moment, what would you use your magic wand on? And Gema, I’m going to start with you, because clearly I mispronounced your name at the start, so I apologize for that. But that gives you the privilege of being the first one to answer about your magic wand.
Gema Zamarro
Thank you. No problem. So I think I will invest it on teachers. I think we have to find ways to recruit and retain and elevate the teaching profession. And I think, yeah, finally solving those shortages that the pandemic has just had made worse. They were there already. So we need to find ways to remunerate people, to attract people to those positions. And I say teachers, but I’m also thinking of support personnel. So that would be my one.
Lanae Erickson
And do you think that that’s mostly about paying those folks more? Is it about a broader recruitment effort? How would you think about doing that?
Gema Zamarro
I think it’s a combination of factors, but I will start with a strategic value paying. And I think we need to invest in working conditions, and we need to figure out better working conditions around, especially supports teachers teaching in more difficult schools, to alleviate that burnout and stress that we have seen so much in the pandemic.
Lanae Erickson
Great. Diane, do you want to jump off that?
Diane Schanzenbach
Sure. Now, of course, if I really had a magic wand, I would go back and make it so that we didn’t keep children out of school for so long. This was a policy choice that we made repeatedly and for such a long time, and especially harmed the most disadvantaged among us, but to be clear, we damaged everyone.
Moving forward, I think that it’s our job to try to remediate these kids in the manner that is least expensive to them. So you would hear people suggest, oh, let’s just give them all an extra year, something like that terrible idea. We’ve already imposed so many costs on them, we need to use our time better, use these wraparound services like tutors, maybe a couple extra weeks of the school year, et cetera. So I think in the absence of sort a time machine, the best I’ve got in terms of a magic wand, is let’s go do the work. Work that we know that we can do, and at this moment, that Congress has appropriated funds for.
Lanae Erickson
Great. Celeste, what about you? How would you use your magic policy wand?
Celeste Carruthers
I might cheat a little bit and piggyback off of something that you said in your comments, Lanae, about differential support or rethinking support and resources for community colleges. Community colleges serve every kind of student, people who have lost their jobs and are re-skilling or up-skilling and looking to go into a new industry, traditional students who have just graduated from high school and are looking ahead to a bachelor’s degree, or who want to stop with an associate’s degree or a certificate. High school students enroll in community colleges through dual enrollment. That’s an important part of career and technical education programs, every kind of student, and they’re all sharing the same class. They have different goals, different visions, and less support. And it’s an unfortunate equation and I think that it’s the bridge between K–12 college and the workforce, and we could do more too shore it up.
Lanae Erickson
Great. Raj, how would you use your special magic wand?
Rajeev Darolia
I think the stock answer is supposed to be, I would grant myself a hundred more wishes, but I’ll say that my first response was actually going to be very similar to Celeste’s and that we need to make investments in education, especially in community colleges. I think one thing, a part of this is really making it simplified in a way that is understandable for folks at the front end and not create really complex systems.
But since Celeste took mine and since my magic will and asked for another wish, the other nerd request that I would make is just a huge investment in data infrastructure. So I think Nat mentioned this, but at K–12 and early childhood and post that and labor market, it’s shocking, and as a researcher, embarrassing at times that the lack of data we have to actually make evidence based decisions in this space. And so that’s a little bit self serving, but that’s my second wish.
Lanae Erickson
Great. Nat, I would guess that you’re pretty happy about that wish, so-
Nat Malkus
I am, but I want my own wand. I don’t want you to take it from me.
Lanae Erickson
You’re allowed to have your own wand.
Nat Malkus
Wand. Yeah, give it a niche answer, but this applies across the board. I do think there’s a lot of things that we can do. I worry that in the current space, when things are feeling more normal, that there’s a lot of students out there, there’s a lot of non-students out there, who do not know that they are behind where they would’ve been. And therefore, we need to alert those students, hey, you need to catch up in your reading. You need to catch up in your high school coursework. You need to go back to community college, because you’re missing benefits that you otherwise would’ve had. So if I had a wand, it would be that the policy choices that people need on the demand side, alarm bells would go off for those folks so that the demand would be there for the supply that we at least have some resources for.
Lanae Erickson
And if I was using my magic wand, I would do Diane’s go back in time trick, but have data on students that were going online in higher education versus in person in higher education, because we had a big giant experiment, and we know very little about the differential outcomes that folks experienced from that.
So we have a great question from the audience, and one I’m sure many are interested in since it’s the topic of this convening. The audience member says, we have talked quite a bit about the experiences that students have had while attending school during the pandemic and subsequent recovery. What implications does all of this have for the labor market? And Celeste, I want to throw it to you first, because you did touch on this a little bit, but then I’d welcome anybody else to jump in.
Celeste Carruthers
Great question. It’s an open question, and the easiest answer is that we don’t quite know yet how it will unfold. But I mean, certainly in the short term, the labor market and employers and students who want to go work for themselves, are going to see the effects of learning losses and from the time that they spent online and the things that they missed while they were online, or while they were taking time off from school if they didn’t go to college and may have otherwise. So those will be the short term things that will be kind of hard to quantify, even if we had a great rich data infrastructure, we won’t quite have a sense of the knowledge and skills that people are not taking into the workforce that they would have otherwise had we had in the world where the pandemic didn’t happen or that everyone was able to attend in person school safely. We won’t know what we’re missing there.
Lanae Erickson
Would anyone else like to jump in on the implications here? Diane, go ahead.
Diane Schanzenbach
Yeah, I have two. So one in the short run, I share the concerns that have been highlighted about the decline, especially in community college enrollment. We have a shortage of nurses, and we see that the flow of new people trained as nurses has declined, because the community college rates have gone down. Similarly, in that work that I did with Sarah Turner, we saw that there were fewer people being trained in assembly repair and maintenance. That meant we had fewer HVAC repair people, just at the time we were all understanding how we wanted to differently blow air through our buildings.
But then speaking about the long term, I mentioned that $14 trillion calculation that Hanushek and Woessmann pulled together. There is lots of evidence that test scores translate into life outcomes in terms of higher productivity, higher wages, better real life outcomes in terms of, well, wages of course are a real life outcome, but in terms of health outcomes, and marriage rates, and home ownership, and if we let anywhere near the depth of the learning loss persist, we’re going to be able to measure that in terms of worse productivity, worse life outcomes, et cetera, really for decades, and it’ll cost us trillions and trillions of dollars.
Lanae Erickson
Nat, Raj, Gema, anybody want to jump in?
Gema Zamarro
Yeah. Yes. Following up on that, I’m very worried about those gaps, but especially inequality moving forward and being able, because like I said, not everybody was affected the same. Not all the kids have access to the same resources. So if we don’t close that, that will have long term effects much worse for certain groups than for others.
Nat Malkus
Renee, I’ll just throw in there. There’s lots of groups that I worry about. It sort of depends on the day, which particular set of students I’m worried about. But I am worried about students who had a quarter to a half, of their high school careers in the pandemic. In part because it’s just such a big chunk of high school, in part because graduation rates didn’t go down, they actually went up in 2020 and then they’ve stayed flat. But we also know that there’s particularly a subset of students on the lower performing end, that probably suffered preparation losses, weren’t as ready as they otherwise would’ve been, they’re by and large out there-
Nat Malkus
… weren’t as ready as they otherwise would’ve been. They’re by and large out there in the same percentages, and they’re not going to community college, so I really worry, or at least not at the same rates. So there’s a hole there and I worry particularly about that. Nick Eberstadt, here at AEI, is always talking about the men without work group, these young men who just are out of the labor force. That’s not a good situation, and I worry that it’s a bubble that will be sustained post-pandemic for that crew.
Rajeev Darolia
This is jumping off something that was said before a little bit, and I don’t think we know the implications yet, but we know the different groups who are less likely to go to college during the pandemic, and the labor market has been so tight, we haven’t really seen the implications of that for a less tight labor market. And so if we do start to experience higher unemployment, I do think one thing we should be concerned about is especially unemployment or income disruption for students from certain groups who that might not show up for a little bit as we hope that a recession doesn’t start.
The other thing I’ll just say, which is a little bit more just mechanical, which I think will be interesting to see the effects of, is just a lot of things have changed in the way that, especially young folks, view their relationship with their employer, view where they want to work and how they want to work. And so we’ve seen an acceleration, not obviously with online education, but also that’s manifested in preferences for online and remote work environments. We’ve seen reservation wages increase as well, as people have decided that they’re not going to be so beholden to their employers and want more worker power. And I think there’s a lot of implications for that that are directly coming out of the pandemic, that we don’t really know how that’s going to shake out over the coming years.
Lanae Erickson
And implications that might look very different in a recession environment as opposed to the one we’re in at the moment. So we have another audience question that I’ll throw to the group, which is, what is one thing that we learned through this crazy pandemic time that we might be able to apply moving forward that could help to improve either our K–12 or our higher education systems? Anybody want to go first? Go ahead, Celeste.
Celeste Carruthers
Yeah, I’ll jump in on the college side. A typical request of colleges and universities is to be nimble in response to or in advance of changes in the labor market and in technology. And we know that that can be hard, that colleges and universities can move very glacially. But they moved pretty quickly in spring 2020 and just evaporated mountains and mountains of what would’ve been red tape to move lots of students and faculty online, to change grading systems, to do a lot of things that if it weren’t a crisis, it would’ve taken much longer and may have been impossible. I mean, it is possible to move quickly and to adapt programming in response to the outside circumstances. I think that’s one lesson that higher ed can take going forward.
Nat Malkus
Lanae, one thing I think that we can learn from this, particularly in the K–12 space, is that school matters. Wow, right? School does really matter. And so that’s one thing, but it also matters that you’re in person. And what I think that we should learn from that, and take clearly to heart, is that a lot of the high-cost, soft-touch parts of schools that are based in relationships and webs of relationships that sustain students through the academic rigors that we want them to drive through and work through. Difficult cannot be substituted by some technocratic academic set of exercises that will grow them the same way. I think disengagement was a huge problem. And I think that all our reforms that we seek to implement to improve schooling has to keep an eye on that without exception.
Lanae Erickson
Diane, it looked like you were ready to jump in next.
Diane Schanzenbach
Yeah, I will certainly agree with that and add to it. We saw our families really struggle with hunger. Another reason why it’s important to be in person is to make sure that kids get access to school meals. In many places, they also have access to medical care. Schools do more than education. They do a broad range of things, and the last thing we should do is close schools. Now, I’ll add to that. We learned a lot about online instruction. We did it badly during the pandemic. I think that wasn’t for lack of effort because we were working really hard at it across the board, but it was a lack of preparation. But I think we will take some things that we learned from that, build out more ability to do individualized instruction with computers. I think this has pushed us far enough that we are going to have to really seriously wrestle with the use of technology in the classroom.
And one parting thought on this is that, moving forward, we’re going to have a lot of new evidence on what is successful and what is less successful in terms of remediation because schools are going to be out there trying all sorts of different things, and it’s incumbent upon all of us to study that and draw the lessons that we can learn, hopefully not for another pandemic anytime in the next 100 years, but for just normal opportunities where we need to provide extra support and remediation for kids.
Rajeev Darolia
I’ll piggyback off of something-
Gema Zamarro
Yeah. No, go.
Lanae Erickson
Go ahead, Raj, and then we’ll get to Gema.
Rajeev Darolia
Sorry, Gema. I’ll piggyback on something Diane said there. So we’ve always known this, but I think it’s really come to the forefront, and I hope the focus will stay on this, is that food policy is education policy. Health policy is education policy. Housing policy is education policy. And during the pandemic, we at least more openly admitted all of this, and I hope we retain that focus going forward. The other piece that I hope we continue to do is just everybody struggled during the pandemic and conversations about mental health, early childhood, K–12, higher ed, people got less concerned about sharing their struggles and institutions directly supporting this. And I really hope we continue to invest in and hold people, whether that’s faculty staff, students, everybody. Again, mental, physical health, all of those things as well.
Gema Zamarro
Yeah, I will just add, I agree with everybody. I will just add that I think we also learn how important the relationships between the school and the families are and the communication there. And that’s something that worries me, following on one comment from Nat, is that I’m not sure the parents right now are getting the right information about where their kids are. And I think that can limit our recovery, making sure, because we have this mismatch between parents not being as worried about their kids, but we see these learning losses happening. So yeah, I’m worried that there is a lack of urgency and to what extent that’s because they are not receiving all the information about where their kids really are.
Lanae Erickson
Yeah, that is very concerning. One other thing that I saw in terms of policymaker conversations was we are all in such a bubble in terms of what we assume people have access to in their own homes or wherever they’re living. And just the assumption that someone would have a laptop, that they could just jump online; that they would have access to reliable broadband; that they would have a room, that they could close the door and do their school work, whether that’s K–12 or college. I just think we saw so many policymakers in Washington, DC, assume that most Americans live like they do, and then it was revealed that that is just absolutely not the case.
So we have another great audience question. Given that we will likely have limited resources, if we are going to be focusing on certain age groups or, I would add, certain student groups for interventions to help them catch up, which ages or groups would make the most sense to focus on with those resources? Gema, I was going to start with you because this was a piece of what you started talking about.
Gema Zamarro
Yeah, yeah. So we saw that certain groups have been more effective than others, and students from minoritized backgrounds and students in low-income communities, have been hit harder. But also, when we think about ages, I think the results, the data that is coming up is suggesting that the youngest kids are recovering faster than the middle-grade kids. And also, if you think about high school kids, yes, they have less time to recover. So I think we should maybe focus on those that are already farther in their education because, yes, they will have less time also to catch up and recover.
Lanae Erickson
Until they have to start paying for whatever their education is moving forward, and then go-
Gema Zamarro
Exactly.
Lanae Erickson
… into great debt in order to remediate those problems. Diane, I’m sure you have thoughts on that.
Diane Schanzenbach
I mean, I agree that if we’re forced to make a decision, I was trying to think, who do I love best, which of my kids do I love best. I’m not sure. But we did so much damage, and it’s just incumbent upon us that we have got to make investments all across the board. I think the investments are going to be more costly and more beneficial to the groups that Gema suggested, and I agree with that. But there is no corner of education that does not need some remediation at this moment.
Lanae Erickson
Yeah. And Nat-
Nat Malkus
Lanae-
Lanae Erickson
Yeah, please.
Nat Malkus
… if I can deny, can I deny the premise of the question? I-
Lanae Erickson
Wait, you think there’s unlimited resources coming from AEI?
Nat Malkus
That wasn’t what I was going to say, but I was going to say that rather than think about it as particular groups, I really think there needs to be a stress, particularly in schools, in K–12 schools and districts. Look, we know the types of students, but teachers on the ground should know. Good teachers know who is behind. They know better than other parents. A lot of parents are saying, “Well, they’re getting Bs. They’re getting Cs. That’s probably okay.” Well, it may not be okay. We’ve seen great inflation. We’ve seen lots of things. So I think it’s really incumbent on the districts to some degree, but it really doesn’t matter what numbers the district emails home to parents because parents don’t care about those numbers.
But if there are teachers who this month have that midterm conference where they’re like, “Your child is dangerously behind, and we have work to do.” That is the kind of communication that we desperately need right now. Gema was mentioning this. Dan Goldhaber talks about this all the time, and I can’t echo it enough. I mean, I think those are the people that we need to hear from. And I know teachers are tired; they’ve had a rough couple of years, but we don’t need them any less. We probably need them more right now while we have those resources to bring to bear in so many places.
Lanae Erickson
Raj and Celeste, I’m curious how you think about this within a higher ed context. Are there certain states of students along that pathway of higher education that we need to be concerned about the most?
Rajeev Darolia
So I think we often think about sometimes related to outcomes like completers, right? So obviously, we know that those who don’t complete have more difficult challenges repaying student loans in the labor markets. So I think that is certainly a group that we should be paying attention to. On the other hand, there is another group, which is, it’s basically those that don’t have the resources or the push to take that risk to bet on themselves and their human capital. And so these are people who are on the cusp of going into education, and then they don’t complete. And so that’s the other group that I think we really need to make sure we’re investing in. What I really hope doesn’t happen is we view the past couple of years as evidence that we don’t need to invest in people going to higher ed or skilling up as they get older. And so certainly I’m worried about non-completers, but also I’m worried at the higher ed level about people who are just going to forego higher education altogether as well.
Celeste Carruthers
Yeah, I think I have a related addendum to that, that if not a specific funding formula focusing on a group of students, I think higher ed should at least be aware of how their systems work for non-traditional and returning students, just given recent trends in college enrollment as well as the increasing specificity of education both in colleges and universities and in the workplace. Some skills are not going to translate as well as technologies adapt, as firms move, and things like that. And there may be more students who are interested in returning to college or going to the college for the first time, and making systems work well for those students would be to everyone’s benefit.
Lanae Erickson
Great. And I think we have time for one more question, which we have in the chat here. So in final thoughts, in your view, what is the biggest barrier right now to aligning our education system to produce the future workforce we need? And if you have a solution to that barrier, even better, please offer it. So, Nat, I think I’m going to start with you this time since you brought up the rear at the start of the show.
Nat Malkus
Caught me unawares, Lanae. Look, I’m not sure, but I have long worried that slipping standards are not good for students, particularly in the high school range. If we are so focused on getting students to graduate that we make it easier for them to graduate, if they’re less prepared, then that’s a problem. I think the pandemic has only created incentives to make this worse. This was obvious, this was a no-brainer in that first pandemic spring. What, over the last two months of school, you’re going to retain a senior for another year? No, of course, no one’s going to do that. And then we struggled for a couple of years. I think that ship really needs to be righted and needs to be attended to, and we don’t have great outcome data for seniors to benchmark that on. So it’s a real challenge. This is not something that’s easy. I can’t pin down an experiment to pin it down or think through it. That doesn’t mean it’s not a big barrier to preparing students for the workforce. So that’s where I’d place it.
Lanae Erickson
Great. Since we’re keeping in the K–12 zone, Gema or Diane, who’d like to go next?
Diane Schanzenbach
I want to talk about higher ed. So, Gema.
Gema Zamarro
Okay. Yeah, so I agree with Nat. I think I agree with him in terms of the standards. Like I said before, also providing families with the right information so if there are resources for mediation, they are aware and they are ready to take up. So I think, moving forward, that will be helpful to reduce these gaps and then it gets kids into track all the way to the end.
Lanae Erickson
Great. Diane, why don’t you transition us then to further in the higher education?
Diane Schanzenbach
Yeah. When we’re talking about producing the workforce that we just place that is underperforming right now is the community college sector, providing training for, especially those men that Nat raised before, that his colleague, Nick Eberstadt, often worries about, that are dropped out of the labor market. We saw a sharp decline in community college enrollment the first year of Covid, and then it’s only gone down since then. To my mind, we have turned up the dial really far in terms of individual funding for Pell Grants and other things to make community colleges more affordable. But I’m convinced by work, by Dave Deming and others, that we probably need to be investing more at the college level to make sure that we’re building capacity in fields that are high return, and we’re not doing that well right now.
Lanae Erickson
Great. Celeste, I would guess that you might have some thoughts about that, but what’s your biggest barrier?
Celeste Carruthers
Yeah, I might punt on this specific question. I have been thinking about alignment a lot recently in the context of career and technical education, and it’s honestly a very tricky question, because if schools, K–12 or college, were perfectly aligned with today’s workforce and were able to respond immediately to changes in technology and changes in local industries and things like that, that would be great for students graduating this year. But is that going to serve those same students five years from now, when they’re 23, or they’re five years post-college? Because, again, firms move and technologies change. And alignment’s a tricky question. The general transferable, or at least sector and industry-specific skills that schools can build up, can stay with students and alumni longer afterwards. But I don’t have a direct answer to the question. I apologize.
Lanae Erickson
Great. Raj, I’m going to give you the last word here.
Rajeev Darolia
Thanks. Yes. So to Celeste’s point, I think we really need to balance this emphasis on employer-specific or specific industry skills with investing in general skills that benefit everyone, right? And so there are more immediate returns to really employer-specific skills, but then there’s longer-term, broader returns to investing in critical thinking and all these other things that we, for whatever reason, seem to not want to invest in nowadays. So I think balancing that is a big barrier. The biggest barrier I see is, I’m hammering this home, and a couple of my comments is really risk. And so we really want people to invest in themselves, and we can encourage that through a number of different ways, both financial and in other ways. And we really need to encourage people to make big bets on themselves and their ability to do good in the world. And so the more risk people see in the world or investing in themselves, I think that’s going to impede meeting the demands of the future labor market.
Lanae Erickson
Yes. Thank you so much. This has been a great conversation, and it is my privilege now to turn things back to Maria Thompson to take us across the finish line.
Maria Thompson
Thank you. And thank you to today’s presenters for sharing your time and expertise with us. And to all of you who joined us for this critical conversation. You are a big part of the conversation, and we want to know what you think. So following this event, we will share a link to a post-event survey. It will only take a few minutes to complete, and we will read every response. This concludes our 2022 Federal Reserve Community Development Research Seminar Series focused on an inclusive recovery. We hope you’ll join us for future events, including a Connecting Communities webinar on December 1st focused on putting the Community Reinvestment Act to work in your community. Visit fedcommunities.org for details. With that, thank you again, and enjoy the rest of your day.