A lost year? Maybe not

Campuses are nearing the end of the fall term, and widespread analysis has already begun of how college students, especially first-term students, have fared academically. After all, these are the students who went through more than a year of "pandemic learning."

The articles are everywhere. Many fear that high schoolers spent a year spinning in their chairs at home while low-quality videos stood in for actual instruction. "My kid learned nothing!" is a common refrain I have heard.

But in higher ed might we see another side? Will we perhaps see in college students a maturity toward their treatment of both time and learning responsibility?

Students moving from high school to college face many transitions. Academically, the work is challenging, but they also face the problem of proportions.

In high school (and before), students spend the majority of their learning lives in classrooms, moving in a structured environment--i.e., to the ring of a bell--from place to place. They spend some smaller amount of time at home doing home-based work. In college, those proportions are abruptly switched: They move to an environment with a little bit of time in a room (and, in many cases, no one requiring that they be accountable for being there) and an enormous responsibility to do work on their own.

This is one of the great pain points in transitioning to college learning, one that has brought down many a promising student.

But the fall '21 college students have already been through learning that to be successful required a lot of independence. They have had to soldier on at home, working in distracting environments in rooms not set up for learning.

So as not to appear obtuse, I want to be clear that I am talking about fall '21 college students, the ones who have pushed through high school and arrived at the next academic stop. There other populations not in college as well as younger children that certainly require a different lens of analysis.

But students who have made it through the doors of their higher institutions of choice may show an unprecedented veterans' experience in college-level learning styles, in which they had to be independent and even perhaps kind of aggressive in their learning, seizing things opportunistically. 

Maybe we have something ourselves to learn here, a result of the blending of e-learning and earlier academic independence. 

I wouldn't wish last year on us all again for anything, but perhaps we can find something salvageable in at least some of our students' education experiences.