January 1, 1970

Five Years Later: How COVID Reshaped Higher Education

Empty lecture hall beside a student attending class remotely on a laptop

March 2020. Roughly 14 million college students got sent home and told to wait. Most thought they'd be back in a few weeks. They weren't. And the university system they eventually returned to — or chose not to return to — had been rewired in ways that no faculty senate vote would have approved in a normal year.

Some of it was painful. Some turned out to be reform that higher education had been deferring for thirty years. Five years out, the picture is clear enough to read honestly.

The Online Experiment That Never Ended

At the peak of the pandemic, nearly 70% of community college classes in California moved online. That was supposed to be a stopgap. Today, 40% of those classes are still fully online — double the pre-pandemic rate of 21%.

The Los Angeles Community College District went from running 10-15% of classes online to 40-50%, and those numbers have barely moved. Foothill College in Los Altos Hills opened brand-new in-person facilities after the pandemic and still delivers 55% of its courses remotely.

The flexibility argument won the policy argument. Nicole Albo-Lopez, Deputy Chancellor of the LA Community College District, said it plainly: "It's here to stay because it's created a new niche of flexibility for both our students and our workforce." Statewide pass rates for online courses are only marginally lower than for in-person instruction. So far, so good.

But "marginally lower" deserves some scrutiny. A West Point study that randomly assigned students to online versus in-person sections found grades dropped by 0.22 standard deviations for the online group. That's not catastrophic. It compounds.

The students who struggle most with online learning are often the ones who chose it for flexibility — because their lives are chaotic enough that scheduled in-person attendance is genuinely impossible.

That's the real tradeoff. Online works reasonably well on average. It creates measurable risks for the most vulnerable students. Those two facts need to be held together, not traded off against each other.

In 2023-24, 75% of students took at least one course online. The share of hybrid course sections more than doubled between 2016-17 and 2023-24. The infrastructure investment behind those numbers — software, training, course redesign — isn't going anywhere.

A Million Missing Students

Before COVID, undergraduate enrollment in American higher education was already drifting downward. Birth rates had been falling since the Great Recession. The labor market was tightening. The pandemic didn't create these pressures. It dropped them into overdrive.

Undergraduate enrollment fell 3.3% in the first pandemic year, then another 3.4% through 2021. Community colleges absorbed the worst of it: 8.4% then 6.5% of their student populations gone in back-to-back years. That's a combined loss approaching 15% in two years.

The losses weren't distributed evenly. Black and Hispanic students left at disproportionately higher rates. In high-poverty high schools, researchers found that remote instruction created college-going losses more than three times larger than in wealthier districts. The students who most needed higher education as a path forward were the ones the pandemic knocked off track.

The National Student Clearinghouse called the resulting gap the "missing million" — students who stopped out during COVID and never re-enrolled. ACT participation fell from 1.78 million students in 2019 to 1.38 million in 2025. That's 400,000 fewer students each year signaling college intent through standardized testing. Some went to trade programs. Many took jobs during an unusually tight labor market. A meaningful number simply never came back.

Student Group	Enrollment Change (2019–2021)
All undergraduates	-6.5% combined
Community college students	-13 to -14%
Black and Hispanic students	Disproportionately higher losses
International students	-12.9% initial drop
Graduate students	Faster partial recovery by 2022
Highly selective university applicants	Increased (higher-income domestic)

That last row is the uncomfortable one. The students most insulated from disruption didn't just hold steady — they benefited from reduced competition. Everyone else lost ground.

The Admissions Reset

Test-optional admissions existed before 2020. A small cluster of liberal arts colleges had adopted it over the prior decade, making the case that SAT scores predicted socioeconomic background more reliably than academic potential. Then testing centers closed in spring 2020, and almost every institution in the country went test-optional overnight.

Most of them stayed that way. Nearly 90% of the 2,275 bachelor's degree-granting institutions in the U.S. remain test-optional or test-blind today. The University of California system went fully test-blind after a judicial ruling made the change permanent. MIT reinstated its SAT/ACT requirement in 2022, citing internal data showing that standardized scores still helped identify capable low-income applicants — a counterintuitive finding that generated real debate. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Stanford later followed MIT back to requiring scores.

So the landscape is genuinely mixed. The majority of schools kept test-optional. A set of highly selective institutions returned to requiring scores. Neither side has been fully vindicated by post-pandemic outcomes data.

What changed permanently, regardless of stated policy, is administrative infrastructure. Schools built essay review workflows, structured interview processes, and portfolio assessment systems to replace the data point they removed. That work required training, software, and embedded process documentation.

Admissions offices retrained around holistic review don't quietly revert to score-cutoff checklists when it becomes convenient. The institutional machinery created by the pandemic pivot is at least as durable as any formal policy commitment — and probably more so.

Closures, Mergers, and a Shrinking Map

At least 49 colleges have closed or announced closures since March 2020. Another 40 have merged. Roughly 53,440 students have been directly affected by private nonprofit college closures alone.

Before the pandemic, the American college closure story was mostly about for-profit institutions — Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute, the slow erosion of the University of Phoenix system. After it, the pressure shifted. Private nonprofit colleges, many operating with endowments well below $50 million, found their revenue assumptions broken simultaneously from every direction.

The financial hit was close to universal. Sixty-one percent of college presidents reported reduced room-and-board income. Seventy-three percent saw auxiliary revenue decline. Ninety-three percent lost special program revenues. The higher education workforce contracted approximately 4% between 2019-20 and 2020-21. In the UK, more than 10,000 academic staff were made redundant in 2024 alone.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's 2024 model isn't reassuring. In a worst-case scenario, up to 80 institutions could close annually, affecting more than 100,000 students and 20,000 staff per year. Even the moderate projection puts 4.6 closures per year as a new baseline, affecting roughly 7,300 students annually.

What's accelerating all of this is timing. Demographers had been warning about the "enrollment cliff" since 2008. The writing was on the wall: fewer babies born during the Great Recession means fewer traditional-age college students now. COVID hit institutions at the exact moment that demographic wave arrived. It's not one problem — it's two hitting simultaneously.

Small private colleges are merging with state systems. Rural campuses are becoming satellite locations. The institutions that looked "quirky but financially sustainable" in 2019 are the ones disappearing now.

Mental Health Becomes Infrastructure

A university administrator in 2018 would have agreed, in principle, that campus mental health services needed expansion. They would not have found the money for it.

COVID changed that calculation. Nationally, 40% of high school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023. Twenty percent of adolescents between 12 and 17 had unmet mental health needs. These students aged into college with those experiences intact, and campuses built for a different student found themselves overwhelmed.

Institutions that treated counseling as a peripheral function scrambled to rebuild. Universities that once maintained one counselor for every 1,500 students pushed toward the International Association of Counseling Services' recommended ratio of 1:1,000 — and many still fall short. Telehealth counseling, which barely existed on campus before 2020, is now standard at most four-year institutions.

The harder problem runs upstream. Chronic absenteeism in K-12 schools (missing 10% or more of the school year) tripled during 2021-22, reaching 30% of students nationally. It's declined since, but still sits at roughly double pre-pandemic levels. A student who's chronically disengaged at 16 is a meaningful statistical predictor of non-enrollment at 18.

What has genuinely changed is institutional seriousness about the problem. Expanded counseling staff, embedded mental health screening in first-year programs, campus-wide telehealth access — these represent infrastructure commitments, not temporary patches.

The Adult Learner Pivot

Here's the part of the post-COVID story that's genuinely good news: schools that spent decades designing programs for 18-to-22-year-olds discovered, somewhat by accident, a market they had mostly been ignoring.

When traditional enrollment collapsed, colleges with strong online infrastructure found a waiting audience. The National Student Clearinghouse estimates that roughly 40 million Americans have some college credits and no degree. People who started and stopped — because of cost, a family obligation, a job offer that felt more urgent than waiting for graduation. Before 2020, most institutions didn't have programs designed around those constraints.

Stackable credentials went from policy jargon to real offerings. Rather than treating a three-year associate's degree or a four-year bachelor's as the only sensible endpoints, institutions built certificate programs that counted toward degrees. Short credentials with immediate labor market value that kept adult students in the pipeline without demanding years of uninterrupted enrollment.

The numbers reflect a real shift. In 2023-24, 75% of students took at least one course online. Hybrid course formats more than doubled as a share of total offerings since 2016-17. Much of that growth came from students who would never have enrolled under a strictly in-person model.

Some critics argue this dilutes the traditional college experience. I'd push back on that. The traditional college experience served one demographic well for a century. Adapting it for the 40 million Americans without degrees isn't dilution — it's finally building programs worthy of the public investment those institutions receive.

The Equity Problem That Didn't Get Solved

This is where honest accounting has to happen. For all the genuine adaptation, COVID made higher education's equity problem worse before any of the solutions took hold. It's still not clear those solutions have closed the gap.

Low-income students lost access to college-going pathways at more than three times the rate of higher-income peers during remote instruction
UC Davis education researcher Michal Kurlaender found that "lower-income students today are further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago"
As of spring 2024, California students remained roughly half a year behind their pre-pandemic academic standing
Research disruptions during the pandemic disproportionately affected women faculty and caregivers, with lasting implications for who advances in academia

The structural inequities COVID exposed were there before March 2020. Remote learning didn't create them — it made them visible. You could count students without reliable internet. You could see which campuses had food pantries that closed when buildings shut down. The inequalities that had been diffuse became suddenly legible.

Whether the new flexibility — expanded online access, adult learner programs, mental health infrastructure — actually reaches the students who lost the most ground is still an open question. The programs exist now. The completion rates for the most vulnerable populations will be the real measure of whether the sector learned anything lasting.

Bottom Line

COVID didn't break American higher education. It ran twenty years of deferred decisions through the system in about eighteen months, and institutions that survived look different in ways that aren't going back.

Online is permanent: 40%+ of community college courses remain fully online, hybrid offerings doubled, and the sunk infrastructure investment behind those numbers isn't reversible
The closures aren't over: 49+ schools have shuttered since 2020, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia projects continued attrition, and the demographic pressure from the enrollment cliff is only deepening
Adult learners changed the market: the 40 million Americans with some college and no degree are now a genuine strategic priority for institutions that want to survive the next decade
Test-optional is the new default for most schools: nearly 90% of bachelor's-degree-granting institutions remain test-optional or test-blind, with administrative machinery that makes reversal unlikely at most of them
The equity gap widened before it narrowed: rigorous, student-level outcome data over the next five years will determine whether the new flexibility actually serves the students who need it most

If you're a student now: the options available to you are genuinely better than they were in 2019. Use them deliberately, not just conveniently.

If you work in higher ed administration: the institutions that survive will be those built for students their systems were never originally designed to serve. That's not a threat. It's the actual market signal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did COVID permanently end the traditional in-person college experience?

No, but it restructured what students expect alongside it. In 2023-24, 73% of course sections were still taught face-to-face. What changed is that students now assume hybrid or online alternatives will coexist with in-person options, and institutions built the infrastructure to deliver that. The residential campus experience remains intact for students who want it — it's the delivery of instruction that became genuinely flexible.

Is online learning as effective as in-person college?

For most students, outcomes are comparable, with important caveats. California statewide data shows pass rates are only marginally lower for online courses. A West Point randomized study found a 0.22 standard deviation grade reduction for students assigned to online sections — real but not catastrophic. The critical qualifier: those negative effects were concentrated among already-disadvantaged students. Online works well on average; it creates measurable risk at the margins, particularly for students dealing with housing instability, unreliable internet, or caregiving responsibilities.

Why did so many colleges close after the pandemic?

The closures reflect converging pressures rather than a single cause. COVID simultaneously destroyed room-and-board income, auxiliary revenue, and special program income for institutions that had little financial cushion. Those short-term shocks landed on schools already facing the "enrollment cliff" — the long-predicted drop in traditional-age students tied to lower birth rates after the 2008 recession. Smaller private nonprofit institutions have been hardest hit, reversing the pre-pandemic pattern where for-profit schools dominated closure statistics.

Did test-optional admissions become permanent after COVID?

At most institutions, yes. Nearly 90% of bachelor's-degree-granting schools remain test-optional or test-blind. The University of California system made the change permanent through a judicial ruling. MIT reinstated test requirements in 2022 after internal data showed scores still helped identify capable low-income applicants. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Stanford later followed. The landscape now splits roughly between a large majority that kept test-optional and a smaller set of elite schools that returned to requiring scores.

How significantly did COVID affect campus mental health services?

Demand surged and has not fully receded. Forty percent of high school students nationally reported persistent sadness in 2023, and those students enrolled in college with those mental health histories intact. Campuses that once operated with one counselor per 1,500 students found themselves overwhelmed. The lasting institutional response includes expanded counseling staff, telehealth platforms, and embedded mental health screening in first-year academic programs — infrastructure investments, not temporary accommodations.

What happened to the students who dropped out during COVID and never returned?

The National Student Clearinghouse called them the "missing million." ACT participation fell from 1.78 million in 2019 to 1.38 million in 2025 — 400,000 fewer students annually signaling college intent. Some entered a tight labor market during an unusual period of wage growth. Some chose trade or vocational programs. Research from UC Davis and others shows the losses hit hardest among Black and Hispanic students and students from low-income high schools, where the negative effects of remote instruction on college-going rates were more than three times larger than in wealthier districts.