The detrimental ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education won’t be going away any time soon, and student mental health is becoming an increasingly urgent issue, according to a recent EAB report.
Dr. Ed Venit
The white paper, “Navigating the Recovery: A Long Term Perspective on Student Success Following the Pandemic and What Actions You Can Take Now,” notes three student success issues that were made worse by the pandemic: K-12 learning loss, high staff turnover rates in higher education, and student mental health needs.
“The pandemic exacerbated long-standing education equity issues and could ultimately reverse decades of work on access and completion,” the report noted. “We should approach this challenge as an opportunity to finally eliminate many unfair barriers to college completion while strengthening our value proposition for tomorrow’s students.”
In the coming years, students who went through their schooling during the pandemic will be the majority of students in higher education, the report notes.
“We found that student success leaders should anticipate at least five more years of elevated student needs,” the report noted. “Lower K-12 test scores extend back to elementary school and foretell heightened demand on academic support staff. Dramatically elevated mental health concerns present an evolving challenge that most schools are not yet ready to meet. Meanwhile, labor market churn among student support staff hinders efforts to get ready, yet also creates an opportunity to implement bold new strategies.”
Of these three issues, student mental health should be the top concern, said EAB Managing Director Dr. Ed Venit, author of the white paper.
"That is a not new challenge, in the sense that we've had mental health concerns for a long time among our students, and there's been a dramatic uptick over the last decade in the demands on services,” Venit said. “But really now, it's becoming a campus-wide issue, and we have data that we've found from other reports that are out there, which you saw replicated in the white paper, that says this is now a bigtime student success challenge in a way that it may not have been fully appreciated before the pandemic but can no longer be ignored in that regard because of just how meaningful it is on student attrition."
