NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON STUDENT EXPERIENCES AND EXPECTATIONS:

EVIDENCE FROM A SURVEY

Esteban M. Aucejo
Jacob F. French
Maria Paola Ugalde Araya
Basit Zafar

Working Paper 27392

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Noah Deitrick and Adam Streff provided excellent research assistance. All errors that remain are
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of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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© 2020 by Esteban M. Aucejo, Jacob F. French, Maria Paola Ugalde Araya, and Basit Zafar. All
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The Impact of COVID-19 on Student Experiences and Expectations: Evidence from a Survey
Esteban M. Aucejo, Jacob F. French, Maria Paola Ugalde Araya, and Basit Zafar
NBER Working Paper No. 27392
June 2020
JEL No. I2,I23,I24

ABSTRACT

In order to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education, we surveyed
approximately 1,500 students at one of the largest public institutions in the United States using an
instrument designed to recover the causal impact of the pandemic on students' current and
expected outcomes. Results show large negative effects across many dimensions. Due to
COVID-19: 13% of students have delayed graduation, 40% lost a job, internship, or a job offer,
and 29% expect to earn less at age 35. Moreover, these effects have been highly heterogeneous.
One quarter of students increased their study time by more than 4 hours per week due to
COVID-19, while another quarter decreased their study time by more than 5 hours per week. This
heterogeneity often followed existing socioeconomic divides; lower-income students are 55%
more likely to have delayed graduation due to COVID-19 than their higher-income peers. Finally,
we show that the economic and health related shocks induced by COVID-19 vary systematically
by socioeconomic factors and constitute key mediators in explaining the large (and
heterogeneous) effects of the pandemic.

Esteban M. Aucejo Maria Paola Ugalde Araya

Department of Economics Arizona State University
Arizona State University [email protected]
P.O. Box 879801
Tempe, AZ 85287 Basit Zafar
and NBER Department of Economics
[email protected] Arizona State University
P.O. Box 879801 Tempe,
Jacob F. French AZ 85287
Arizona State University and NBER
[email protected] [email protected]
1 Introduction

The disruptive effects of the COVID-19 outbreak have impacted almost all sectors of our society. Higher

education is no exception. Anecdotal evidence paints a bleak picture for both students and universities.

According to the American Council on Education, enrollment is likely to drop by 15% in the fall of 2020,

while at the same time many institutions may have to confront demands for large tuition cuts if classes

remain virtual.1 In a similar vein, students face an increasingly uncertain environment, where financial and

health shocks (for example, lack of resources to complete their studies or fear of becoming seriously sick),

along with the transition to online learning may have affected their academic performance, educational plans,

current labor market participation, and expectations about future employment.

This paper attempts to shed light on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on college students. First,

we describe and quantify the causal effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on a wide set of students’ out-

comes/expectations. In particular, we analyze enrollment and graduation decisions, academic performance,

major choice, study and social habits, remote learning experiences, current labor market participation,

and expectations about future employment. Second, we study how these effects differ along existing so-

cioeconomic divides, and whether the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities. Finally, we present

suggestive evidence on the mechanisms behind the heterogeneous COVID-19 effects by quantifying the role

of individual-level financial and health shocks on academic decisions and labor market expectations.

For this purpose, we surveyed about 1,500 undergraduate students at Arizona State University (ASU),

one of the largest public universities in the United States, in late April 2020. The fact that ASU is a large

and highly diverse institution makes our findings relevant for most public institutions in the country. The

survey was explicitly designed to not only collect student outcomes and expectations after the onset of the

pandemic, but also to recover counterfactual outcomes in the absence of the outbreak. Specifically, the survey

asked students about their current experiences/expectations and what those experiences/expectations would

have been had it not been for the pandemic. Because we collect information conditional on both states of

the world (with the COVID-19 pandemic, and without) from each student, we can directly analyze how

each student believes COVID-19 has impacted their current and future outcomes.2 For example, by asking

students about their current GPA in a post-COVID-19 world and their expected GPA in the absence of

COVID-19, we can back out the subjective treatment effect of COVID-19 on academic performance. The

credibility of our approach depends on: (1) students having well-formed beliefs about outcomes in the

counterfactual scenario. This is a plausible assumption in our context since the counterfactual state is a
1 See, the New York Times article “After Coronavirus, Colleges Worry: Will Students Come Back?” (April 15, 2020) for a

discussion surrounding students’ demands for tuition cuts.

2 In some cases, instead of asking students for the outcomes in both states of the world, we directly ask for the difference.

For example, the survey asked how the pandemic had affected the student’s graduation date.

2
realistic and relevant one - it was the status quo less than two months before the survey, and (2) there being

no systematic bias in the reporting of the data - an assumption that is implicitly made when using any

survey data.3

Our findings on academic outcomes indicate that COVID-19 has led to a large number of students delaying

graduation (13%), withdrawing from classes (11%), and intending to change majors (12%). Moreover,

approximately 50% of our sample separately reported a decrease in study hours and in their academic

performance. The data also show that while all subgroups of the population have experienced negative

effects due to the outbreak, the size of the effects is heterogeneous. For example, compared to their higher-

income counterparts, lower-income students (those with below-median parental income) are substantially

more likely to delay graduation. Finally, we find that students report a decrease in their likelihood of taking

online classes as a result of their recent experiences. These effects are, however, more than 150% larger for

honors students, suggesting that, a priori, most engaged students strongly prefer in-person classes.

As expected, the COVID-19 outbreak also had large negative effects on students’ current labor market

participation and expectations about post-college labor outcomes. Working students suffered a 31% decrease

in their wages and a 37% drop in weekly hours worked, on average. Moreover, around 40% of students lost

a job, internship, or a job offer, and 61% reported to have a family member that experienced a reduction

in income. The pandemic also had a substantial impact on students’ expectations about their labor market

prospects post-college. For example, their perceived probability of finding a job decreased by almost 20%,

and their expected earnings when 35 years old (around 15 years from the outbreak) declined by approximately

2.5%. This last finding suggests that students expect the pandemic to have a long-lasting impact on their

labor market prospects.

We find that the substantial variation in the impact of COVID-19 on students tracked with existing

socioeconomic divides. For example, compared to their more affluent peers, lower-income students are 55%

more likely to delay graduation due to COVID-19 and are 41% more likely to report that COVID-19 impacted

their major choice. Further, COVID-19 nearly doubled the gap between higher- and lower-income students’

expected GPA.4 There also is substantial variation in the pandemic’s effect on preference for online learning,

with Honors students and males revising their preferences down by more than 2.5 times as much as their

peers. However, despite appearing to be more disrupted by the switch to online learning, the impact of

COVID-19 on Honors students’ academic outcomes is consistently smaller than the impact on non-Honors

students.
3 This approach has been used successfully in several other settings, such as to construct career and family returns to

college majors (Arcidiacono et al., 2020; Wiswall and Zafar, 2018), and the causal impact of health on retirement (Shapiro and
Giustinelli, 2019)
4 The income gap in GPA increased from 0.052 to 0.098 on a 4 point scale. It is significant at the 1% level in both scenarios.

3
 Finally, we evaluate the extent to which mitigating factors associated with more direct economic and

health shocks from the pandemic (for example, a family member losing income due to COVID-19, or the

expected probability of hospitalization if contracting COVID-19) can explain much of the heterogeneity

in pandemic effects. We find that both types of shock (economic and health) play an important role in

determining students’ COVID-19 experiences. For example, the expected probability of delaying graduation

due to COVID-19 increases by approximately 25% if either a student’s subjective probability of being late on

a debt payment in the following 90 days (a measure of financial fragility) or subjective probability of requiring

hospitalization conditional on contracting COVID-19 increases by one standard deviation. As expected, the

magnitude of health and economic shocks are not homogeneous across the student population. The average

of the principal component for the economic and health shocks is about 0.3-0.4 standard deviations higher for

students from lower-income families. Importantly, we find that the disparate economic and health impacts

of COVID-19 can explain 40% of the delayed graduation gap (as well as a substantial part of the gap for

other outcomes) between lower- and higher-income students.

To our knowledge, this is the first paper to shed light on the effects of COVID-19 on college students’

experiences. The treatment effects that we find are large in economic terms. Whether students are overre-

acting in their response to the COVID-19 shock is not clear. Individuals generally tend to overweight recent

experiences (Malmendier and Nagel, 2016; Kuchler and Zafar, 2019). However, whether students’ subjective

treatment effects are “correct” in some ex-post sense is beside the point. As long as students are reporting

their subjective beliefs without any systematic bias, it is the perceived treatment effects, not actual ones, –

regardless of whether they are correct or not – which are fundamental to understanding choices. For example,

if students (rightly or wrongly) perceive a negative treatment effect of COVID-19 on the returns to a college

degree, this belief will have an impact on their future human capital decisions (such as continuing with their

education, choice of major, etc.).

Our results underscore the fact that the COVID-19 shock is likely to exacerbate socioeconomic disparities

in higher education. This is consistent with findings regarding the impacts of COVID-19 on K-12 students.

Kuhfeld et al., 2020 project that school closures are likely to lead to significant learning losses in math

and reading. However, they estimate heterogeneous effects, and conclude that high-performing students are

likely to make gains. Likewise, Chetty et al., 2020 find that, post-COVID, student progress on an online

math program decreased significantly more in poorer ZIP codes. Our analysis reveals that the heterogeneous

economic and health burden imposed by COVID-19 is partially responsible for these varying impacts. This

suggests that by addressing the economic and health impacts imposed by COVID-19, policy makers may be

able to prevent COVID-19 from widening existing gaps in higher education.