Dive Brief:
- The pandemic transition to fully virtual K-12 instruction during the 2020-21 school year led to fewer students going to college, according to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- When schools moved to online classes, submission rates for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid dropped by 4.2 percentage points and first-year college enrollment fell by 2.5 percentage points, the study found. Test-taking rates for ACT also declined by 4.8 percentage points.
- While FAFSA submission rates partially recovered after schools began to reopen in the 2021-22 school year, the study found minimal signs of rebounding participation in the ACT or in first-year college enrollment.
Dive Insight:
The pivot to remote instruction may have impacted students’ paths to college, the study said, because reduced contact with school counselors and teachers may have “weakened students’ expectations that college was feasible or worthwhile.”
Additionally, in-person schooling can provide more support to students for completing the FAFSA or registering for college admissions tests, the study said.
Virtual instruction also had greater negative impacts on college-going activity at schools with a higher concentration of low-income students, according to the study. Schools with more students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch saw much larger declines in FAFSA completion and college enrollment.
Estimates indicate the negative effect of virtual instruction to be "more than three times larger in higher-poverty schools,” the researchers said. “This pattern suggests that school-based guidance and reminders are especially important for disadvantaged students, who may be disproportionately first-generation college students and have fewer alternative sources of information and support outside school.”
The study looked at data across 14,005 public high schools from the 2015-16 to 2021-22 school years, analyzing across sources including the COVID School Data Hub, federal data on FAFSA submissions, college enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, participation data from ACT, and school demographics from the National Center for Education Statistics. The study did not examine SAT data.
Previous research has reached similar conclusions on the pandemic’s effects on financial aid applications and college admissions testing participation.
Both the SAT and ACT are still struggling to attract the same number of students as before the pandemic. According to fall 2025 data, 1.38 million students took the ACT in 2025 compared to 1.78 million in 2019. And some 2 million students took the SAT in 2025 versus 2.22 million in 2019.
In November 2024, the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, found that FAFSA completion rates among low-income students had mostly rebounded from pandemic-era dips. Middle-income students, however, still saw lower completion rates than they did prior to the pandemic, the foundation said.
