COVID-19 and academic performance in higher education

Núria Rodríguez-Planas and Mehlika Ozsoy

Chapter Chapter 21 in Handbook on Inequality and COVID-19, 2025, pp 341-364 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Using an unbalanced panel of 19,464 academic records covering spring 2019 to 2022 and representing close to one fourth of the Queens College undergraduate student population, we find that academic performance varied differentially by students’ characteristics. Black and Hispanic students’ likelihood to graduate decreased during the pandemic relative to White students, yet they experienced a short-lived overperformance in their semester GPA during the year 2020 tied to a higher use of the flexible grading policy. Male students also had a short-lived overperformance in grades, with no differential gender impact on graduation rates. The pandemic brought more persistent improvements to Pell Grant recipients’ GPA than non-recipients, which translated into a higher likelihood of graduating on time. In contrast, a different group of vulnerable students who rely more on wage and salary jobs than financial assistance-transfer students-saw their relative performance worsened both in terms of semester GPA as well as graduation rates.

Keywords: Academic records; (On-time) graduation; Event analysis; Individual fixed effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035302758
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