Just 2% of students from the high school class of 2020 who didn’t immediately enroll in fall 2020 went on to enroll in fall 2021. The authors note, “There are no signs that the unusually large number of 2020 graduates who did not go to college immediately
in fall 2020 have entered college this fall instead.” The data come from the same panel of 3,500 high schools used in the NSCRC’s report this past March.
Notably, the report did not cover the class of 2021’s postsecondary outcomes; these will be reported in a subsequent report in the spring. It does include persistence outcomes for the class of 2018 and six-year completion outcomes for the class of 2014.
"Gap year" enrollment has not historically been high, according to the report. The NSCRC notes that just 2.6% of students from the class of 2018 enrolled in 2019 and 2.2% of the class of 2019 did so in 2020. Still, there had been some hopeful positing
that maybe class of 2020 graduates would wind up enrolling later. That hypothesis hasn’t panned out.
As NCAN Chief Executive Officer Kim Cook told the Washington Post in September 2020, “The notion of a gap year does not exist for these students.
If they don’t start attending now, life will happen. They’ll help their family or get a job. Then it will not seem possible to make time for college.”
These results are in some way unsurprising even as they are still discouraging. (This has become a constant refrain since March 2020.) There's a lot of completely justified handwringing about access to college and career readiness counseling in high schools
because of systemic capacity issues in the K-12 sector. However, the fact remains that as an adult the analog to "school counselor" doesn't really exist for most people. Even with the inconsistent delivery of college and career advising in most parts
of the country, there will never be a time in most people's lives when they have more access to college and career counseling than they do as a high school junior or senior.
Consequently, when a student misses the immediate enrollment window following high school, “life happens,” as Kim Cook noted. That can be good for students, but it’s typically bad for their prospects for postsecondary attainment. Following high school,
students are “in the wind,” and there are not many good and large-scale mechanisms for on-ramping them back onto postsecondary pathways once they miss the immediate enrollment window.
Strategies for successfully reconnecting students disrupted by the pandemic include
holistically meeting the needs of students, leveraging partnerships to develop and deliver practices, and continually reassessing and refining what works.
Engaging students through a range of modalities, from virtual communication to in-person events, can help provide students with the guidance they need to navigate education decisions.
Integrating resources and support from community-based services, designating aid programs for specific student populations, and assisting students with financial aid applications are effective practices for helping students overcome a range of
affordability challenges.
Short-term and career-focused training options can offer an entry point into postsecondary education for students who are focused on starting their careers.
The disruption and hardship caused by the pandemic also sparked creative and innovative approaches to reconnecting learners. Practitioners are now facing the challenge of sustaining these practices and continuing to build on what works.
The whole brief is worth a read for NCAN members (and other partners in the field) interested in taking up the COVID recovery for the class of 2020 (and likely the class of 2021).
The class of 2020 experienced first fall enrollment declines of approximately 7%. These declines were inequitably distributed across different categories of high schools, with institutions serving more students of color and students from low-income backgrounds
seeing steeper drops. Given those declines, technical assistance on on-ramping students back into some kind of postsecondary pathway is going to be critical. The NSCRC’s newest report shows us students won’t find, and haven’t found, those on-ramps
by osmosis.
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