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

http://www.nber.org/papers/w27392

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
June 2020

Noah Deitrick and Adam Streff provided excellent research assistance. All errors that remain are
ours. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been
peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies
official NBER publications.

© 2020 by Esteban M. Aucejo, Jacob F. French, Maria Paola Ugalde Araya, and Basit Zafar. All
rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without
explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.
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.

4
2 Data

2.1 Survey

Our data come from an original survey of undergraduate students at Arizona State University (ASU),

one of the largest public universities in the United States. Like other higher educational institutions in the

US, the Spring 2020 semester started in person. However, in early March during spring break, the school

announced that instruction would be transitioned online and that students were advised not to return to

campus.

The study was advertised on the My ASU website, accessible only through the student’s ASU ID and

password. Undergraduate students were invited to participate in an online survey about their experiences

and expectations in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, for which they would be paid $10. The study was

posted during the second to last week of instruction for the spring semester (April 23rd). Our sample size

was constrained by the research funds to 1,500 students, and the survey was closed once the desired sample

size was reached. We reached the desired sample size within 3 days of posting the survey.

The survey was programmed in Qualtrics. It collected data on students’ demographics and family back-

ground, their current experiences (both for academic outcomes and non-academic outcomes), and their

future expectations. Importantly, for the purposes of this study, the survey collected data on what these

outcomes/expectations would have been in the counterfactual state, without COVID-19.

2.2 Sample

A total of 1,564 respondents completed the survey.5 90 respondents were ineligible for the study (such

as students enrolled in graduate degree programs or diploma programs) and were dropped from the sample.

Finally, responses in the 1st and 99th percentile of survey duration were further excluded, leading to a final

sample size of 1,446. The survey took 38 minutes to complete, on average (median completion time was 26

minutes).

The first five columns of Table 1 show how our sample compares with the broader ASU undergradu-

ate population and the average undergraduate student at other large flagship universities (specifically, the

largest public universities in each state). Relative to the ASU undergraduate population, our sample has a

significantly higher proportion of first-generation students (that is, students with no parent with a college

degree) and a smaller proportion of international students. The demographic composition of our sample

compares reasonably well with that of students in flagship universities. Our sample is also positively selected

in terms of SAT/ACT scores relative to these two populations.

5 The 64 people taking the survey at the moment the target sample size (1,500) was reached were allowed to finish.

5
 The better performance on admission tests could be explained by the high proportion of Honors students

in our sample (22% compared to 18% in the ASU population). The last four columns of Table 1 show how

Honors students compare with ASU students and the average college student at a top-10 university. We see

that they perform better than the average ASU student (which is expected) and just slightly worse than the

average college student at a top-10 university. The share of white Honors students in our sample (60%) is

higher than the proportion in the ASU population and much higher than the proportion of white students

in the top-10 universities.

Overall, we believe our sample of ASU students is a reasonable representation of students at other large

public schools, while the Honors students may provide insight into the experiences of students at more elite

institutions.

3 Analytic Framework

We next outline a simple analytic framework that guides the empirical analysis . Let Oi (COV ID-19) be

the potential outcome of individual i associated with COVID-19 treatment. We are interested in the causal

impact of COVID-19 on student outcomes:

∆i (O) = Oi (COV ID-19 = 1) − Oi (COV ID-19 = 0), (1)

where the first term on the right-hand side is student i’s outcome in the state of the world with COVID-19,

and the second term being student i’s outcome in the state of the world without COVID-19. Recovering

the treatment effect at the individual level entails comparison of the individual’s outcomes in two alternate

states of the world. With standard data on realizations, a given individual is observed in only one state of the

world (in our case, COV ID-19 = 1). The alternate outcomes are counterfactual and unobserved. A large

econometric and statistics literature studies how to identify these counterfactual outcomes and moments of

the counterfactual outcomes (such as average treatment effects) from realized choice data (e.g., Heckman

and Vytlacil, 2005; Angrist and Pischke, 2009; Imbens and Rubin, 2015). Instead, the approach we use in

this paper is to directly ask individuals for their expected outcomes in both states of the world. From the

collected data, we can then directly calculate the individual-level subjective treatment effect. As an example,

consider beliefs about end-of-semester GPA. The survey asked students “What semester-level GPA do you

expect to get at the end of this semester?” This is first-term on the right-hand side of equation (1). The

counterfactual is elicited as follows “Were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic, what semester-level GPA

would you have expected to get at the end of the semester?”. The difference in the responses to these two

6
questions gives us the subjective expected treatment effect of COVID-19 on the student’s GPA. For certain

binary outcomes in the survey, we directly ask students for the ∆i . For example, regarding graduation plans,

we simply ask a student if the ∆i is positive, negative, or zero: “How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected

your graduation plan? [graduate later; graduation plan unaffected; graduate earlier].”

The approach we use in this paper follows a small and growing literature that uses subjective expectations

to understand decision-making under uncertainty. Specifically, Arcidiacono et al. (2020) and Wiswall and

Zafar (2018) ask college students about their beliefs for several outcomes associated with counterfactual

choices of college majors, and estimate the ex-ante treatment effects of college majors on career and family

outcomes. Shapiro and Giustinelli (2019) use a similar approach to estimate the subjective ex-ante treatment

effects of health on labor supply. There is one minor distinction from these papers: while these papers

elicit ex-ante treatment effects, in our case, we look at outcomes that have been observed (for example,

withdrawing from a course during the semester) as well as those that will be observed in the future (such

as age 35 earnings). Thus, some of our subjective treatment effects are ex-post in nature while others are

ex-ante.

The soundness of our approach depends on a key assumption that students have well-formed expectations

for outcomes in both the realized state and the counterfactual state. Since the outcomes we ask about are

absolutely relevant and germane to students, they should have well-formed expectations for the realized state.

In addition, given that the counterfactual state is the one that had been the status quo in prior semesters

(and so students have had prior experiences in that state of the world), their ability to have expectations for

outcomes in the counterfactual state should not be a controversial assumption.6

4 Empirical Analysis

4.1 Treatment Effects

We start with the analysis of the aggregate-level treatment effects, which are presented in Table 2. The

outcomes are organized in two groups, academic and labor market (see Appendix Table A1 for a complete

list of outcomes). The first two columns of the table show the average beliefs for those outcomes where the

survey elicited beliefs in both states of the world. The average treatment effects shown in column (3) are of

particular interest. Since we can compute the individual-level treatment effects, columns (4)-(7) of the table

show the cross-sectional heterogeneity in the treatment effects.

6 Thisis different from asking students in normal times about their expected outcomes in a state with online teaching and no
campus activities (COVID-19) since most students would not have had any experience with this counterfactual prior to March
this year.

7
 We see that the average treatment effects are statistically and economically significant for all outcomes.

The average impacts on academic outcomes, shown in Panel A, are mostly negative. For example, the average

subjective treatment effect of COVID-19 on semester-level GPA is a decline of 0.17 points. More than 50%

of the students in our sample expect a decrease in their GPA due to the treatment (versus only 7% expecting

an increase). Additionally, on average, 13% of the participants delayed their graduation, 11% withdrew from

a class during the spring semester, and 12% stated that their major choice was impacted by COVID-19. An

interesting and perhaps unanticipated result is that, on average, students are 4 percentage points less likely

to enroll in an online class given their experience with online instruction due to the pandemic.7,8 However,

there is a substantial amount of variation in terms of the direction of the effect: 31% (47%) of the participants

are now more (less) likely to enroll in online classes. We explore this heterogeneity in more detail in the

next section, but it seems that prior experience with having taken online classes somewhat ameliorates the

negative experience: the average treatment effect for students with prior experience with online classes is a

2.4 percentage points decrease in their likelihood of enrolling in online classes, versus a 9.5 percentage points

decline for their counterparts (difference statistically significant at the 0.1% level).

This large variation in the treatment effects of COVID-19 is apparent in several of the other outcomes,

such as study hours, where the average treatment effect of COVID-19 on weekly study hours is -0.9 (that is,

students spend 0.9 less hours studying per week due to COVID-19). The interquartile range of the across-

subject treatment effect demonstrates substantial variation, with the pandemic decreasing study time by 5

hours at the 25th percentile and increasing study time by 4 hours at the 75th.

Overall, these results suggest that COVID-19 represents a substantial disruption to students’ academic

experiences, and is likely to have lasting impacts through changes in major/career and delayed gradua-

tion timelines. Students’ negative experiences with online teaching, perhaps due to the abruptness of the

transition, also has implications for the willingness of students to take online classes in the future.

Turning to Panel B in Table 2, we see that students’ current and expected labor market outcomes were

substantially disrupted by COVID-19. As for the extensive margin of current employment, on average, 29%

of the students lost the jobs they were working at prior to the pandemic (67% of the students were working

prior to the pandemic), 13% of students had their internships or job offers rescinded, and 61% of the students

reported that a close family member had lost their job or experienced an income reduction. The last statistic

is in line with findings from other surveys of widespread economic disruption across the US.9 Respondents
7 The questions that were asked to elicit this were: “ Suppose you are given the choice to take a course online/remote or
in-person. [Had you NOT had experience with online/remote classes this semester], what is the percent chance that you would
opt for the online/remote option?”
8 This result is in line with a survey about eLearning experiences across different universities in Washington and New York

that concludes that 75% of the students are unhappy with the quality of their classes after moving to online learning due to
COVID-19.
9 According to the US Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey Week 3, 48% of the surveyed households have experienced a

8
experienced an average decrease of 11.5 hours of work per week and a 21% decrease in weekly earnings,

although there was no change in weekly earnings for 52% of the sample, which again reflects substantial

variation in the effects of COVID-19 across students.

In terms of labor market expectations, on average, students foresee a 13 percentage points decrease in

the probability of finding a job by graduation, a reduction of 2 percent in their reservation wages, and a

2.3 percent decrease in their expected earnings at age 35. The significant changes in reservation wages and

expected earnings at age 35 due to COVID-19 demonstrate that students expect the treatment effects of

COVID-19 to be long-lasting. This is consistent with Oreopoulos et al. (2012) which finds that graduating

during a recession implies an initial loss in earnings of 9% that decreases to 4.5% within 5 years and disappears

after 10 years. Rothstein (2020) estimates that the Great Recession may have even longer-lasting effects on

graduates’ employment.

4.2 Heterogeneous Effects

We next explore demographic heterogeneity in the treatment effects of COVID-19. Figure 1 plots the

average treatment effects across several relevant demographic divisions including gender, race, parental

education, and parental income. Honors college status and expected graduation cohort are also included as

interesting dimensions of heterogeneity in the COVID-19 context. The figure shows the impacts for six of

the more economically meaningful outcomes from Table 2 (additional outcomes can be found in Figure A1).

At least four patterns of note emerge from Figure 1. First, compared to their classmates, students from

disadvantaged backgrounds (lower-income students defined as those with below-median parental income,

racial minorities, and first-generation students) experienced larger negative impacts for the academic out-

comes, as shown in the first three panels of the figure.10 The trends are most striking for lower-income

students, who are 55% more likely to delay graduation due to COVID-19 than their more affluent class-

mates (0.16 increase in the proportion of those expecting to delay graduation versus 0.10), expect 30%

larger negative effects on their semester GPA due to COVID-19, and are 41% more likely to report that

COVID-19 impacted their major choice (these differences are statistically significant at the 5% level). For

some academic outcomes, COVID-19 had similarly disproportionate effects on nonwhite and first-generation

students, with nonwhite students being 70% more likely to report changing their major choice compared

to their white peers, and first-generation students being 50% more likely to delay their graduation than

students with college-educated parents. Thus, while on average COVID-19 negatively impacted several

measures of academic achievement for all subgroups, the effects are significantly more pronounced for socioe-
loss in employment income since March 13 2020.
10 The cutoff for median parental income in our sample is $80,000