There were no more elbow bumps at the lockers, frantic study sessions in the library or whispers of questions at the teacher's desk. Full, lively classrooms were shrunk down to a single glowing screen and a webcam.
Nearly six years later, a generation of first-year college students is still feeling the fallout, shaped by years of online high school, isolation and disrupted learning during some of their most formative years. Even as college life is back to business as usual, educators say the pandemic's academic and emotional aftershocks remain. The students in the "COVID cohort," or those who graduated high school after 2020, are starting college with noticeable learning gaps and deep anxiety about belonging, effects that experts warn could linger for years.
"When COVID-19 hit," said Frank Worrell, a distinguished professor in UC Berkeley's School of Education and a college preparatory director, "I think it actually disrupted us so much more than we ever thought it would."
AN ACADEMIC CRISIS
Worrell and other educators said spending critical high school years online or partially online left today's students unprepared for both academic and social pressures of college life.
In other words, according to Worrell, learning builds upon itself, and a year or two of disrupted learning can have huge repercussions down the line. A November report from UC San Diego's Senate Administration Workgroup on Admissions highlights the steep decline in academic preparation among incoming first-year students. Some of the largest gaps are in math, writing and language skills, with the report linking much of the decline to the impact of pandemic schooling.
According to the report, between 2020 and 2025, there were 30 times more students than prior years who did not meet high school math standards on placement exams, even though they met the UC admission requirements. For the 2025 incoming class — students who began high school during the pandemic — more than 70 percent of the students who were categorized as underprepared failed to meet middle school math standards. Authors of the report called the deficiencies a "serious" problem and said the situation warrants an "immediate" response from the university.
"Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure. It also puts significant strain on faculty who work to maintain rigorous instructional standards," the report reads. "Especially now, when our resources become more constrained, we cannot take on more remedial education than we can responsibly and effectively deliver."
Learning loss isn't just a crisis at UC San Diego. It's a problem that extends across the country. Arun Sharma, a UC Berkeley mathematics professor who teaches mostly first-year students, told SFGATE that he has seen the trend in his classes. He said some of the key challenges during the pandemic were instructors struggling to adapt to Zoom classrooms on the fly and students who were tuned out while at home.
"It's hard because there's so many factors there, but I definitely feel like [the pandemic] had an impact. The very first class I had after sort of the pandemic ended, at least we went back to in person, that was probably the worst class I'd ever had," Sharma said. "They are much weaker in terms of their ability."
It's not a coincidence that pandemic high schoolers struggled particularly with math. In California public schools, core math concepts are typically taught in ninth grade or even earlier, such as algebra in middle school. The youngest college students now probably learned core math concepts through a computer screen.
That left some students without key math foundations, creating especially damaging gaps because each level builds on the one before it.
Worrell agreed. "We keep reminding students [who ask], 'Why do I have to learn algebra?' Because it's important for geometry," he said. "'Why do I have to learn geometry?' Because it's important for calculus."
'LESS THAN STELLAR WORK'
During pandemic learning, many teachers lowered grading standards, with some courses even switching from letter grades to pass/fail. Worrell said that is one of the biggest reasons it's difficult for current students to adjust back to regular schooling.
"They've gotten used to getting more time to get work done," he said. Grading also was more lenient, which led to students getting passing grades for what he called "less than stellar work."
"In some cases, grading was done just for turning in assignments," he said. "There was not the expectations of rigor that you would have expected."
That also made it harder for college admissions officers to accurately assess students' abilities, according to a UC San Diego study.
Breanne Boyle, a college adviser of 15 years who runs her own company, BB College Prep, told SFGATE that she saw "grade inflation" when she looked at standardized test scores. Students who would be expected to hit a certain benchmark based on their classroom grades, she said, were scoring "noticeably lower" than expected on national exams.
The onset of the pandemic also forced teachers to pivot to fully online classrooms almost overnight, scrambling to rework their courses midyear and adapt to virtual teaching in real time. Teachers had to learn how to turn Zoom into a classroom and engage with students only through a video screen or an email.
"I think that was just a bit of a perfect storm of why there was some disengagement and maybe not as much learning done in the same way it might have been done in person," Boyle said. "Had it been different, like a fully planned online transition to things, I think it probably would've [played out] differently."
Individual circumstances vary, and students from less advantaged backgrounds may have faced the greatest challenges, yet the learning gaps remain widespread across this cohort.
"Whether this decrease in achievement was about teachers being less effective at delivering instruction online, or about students being less effective at learning and retaining it — or both! — regardless, the decline is tangible and will take several years to correct," the authors of the UC San Diego report wrote.
AN ANXIETY-RIDDEN GENERATION
Beyond the logistical chaos of the pandemic-era schooling, this cohort of college students is grappling with anxiety about being in a classroom and having difficulty interacting with their peers. Boyle said that in recent years, the students she advises on college admissions have required more "hand holding." For example, she said, when she suggests volunteer opportunities to the students she advises, many don't know how to get started or where to look for openings.
"The students don't seem to know as much how to be proactive or go out and figure something out how to problem-solve," she said.
Boyle added that students in this cohort are reluctant to talk to people verbally and prefer written communication, which can hinder how much value they get out of their instructors. While some of this tendency is generational and not solely tied to the pandemic, it exacerbates existing issues.
"There also seems like there's a little bit of a struggle there, like communicating with adults, reaching out and doing that on their own," Boyle said. "I will tell them, you know, sometimes the phone call helps, and then they will be like, 'Oh I'm not going to do that.'"
Worrell said he believes some of today's students struggle with transitioning to college because they missed out on core in-person high school experiences that would have helped them learn how to manage their schedules. Without having to sprint between hallways to get to class on time, or having to balance free periods and extracurriculars, some independence-building was lost. As a result, Worrell said many incoming students are more anxious and self-conscious than previous groups, something he believes is largely related to a feeling of "imposter syndrome."
"The idea of belonging, feeling that I fit into a class, is not something that they're used to doing," Worrell said. "But having teachers be more intentional, or professors being more intentional about creating an atmosphere of belonging in a class, is something that universities have been trying to do."
Katherine Williamson, an Orange County private practice pediatrician, told SFGATE that she has seen rising anxiety in this cohort over the past several years. The worries that students developed in their early teens during the turbulence of the pandemic followed them into their college years.
"All of us felt it," she said. "We were all trapped, you know, kind of indoors, and we're doing the normal things, and then we didn't know what was going to happen."
According to the World Health Organization, anxiety and depression increased by 25 percent in just the first year of the pandemic. In a 2025 study from the National Institutes of Health, young adults from under-resourced backgrounds experienced the sharpest mental health declines because of the pandemic.
Williamson said she's observed many young adults feeling "directionless" after dealing with the uncertainty of the pandemic. It shows up even in the little things, Williamson said, like how more and more of her patients aren't getting their driver's licenses when they turn 16.
"I feel like there's sort of a motivation factor that has dampened a lot of the generations of the pandemic," she said. "It's tough to know. ... Did the pandemic truly contribute to the cause? At the very least, it accelerated it even if we were heading in that direction."
There were also small changes to retention rates for the cohorts of students who entered college early on in the pandemic. During the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years, the university system saw a slight decrease in first-year retention rates, with 91.7 percent of the students staying in school, according to UC data shared with SFGATE, compared with 92.6 percent in 2019. In 2023, the system bounced back to pre-pandemic levels with 92.6 percent of students remaining in school for the first year, according to UC data.
In the California State University system, there was a similar trend. In fall 2020, 83.4 percent of students continued on after the first year, a drop from 85.5 percent in fall 2019, according to data from the university system. The percentage of continuing students fell again to 81.7 percent in 2021 before rebounding to 82.4 percent in 2022. (Retention rate data for the most recent group of first-year students in the CSU and UC systems is not yet available.)
SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT
There are some signs that the students poised to enter college this fall are better prepared. According to data released in October from the California Department of Education, K-12 students in the 2024-2025 academic year improved their math and English test scores by 1.8 percentage points over the prior year.
In California, enrollment is gradually rebounding, too, with more students entering college than in previous years. In the CSU system, there was a 2 percent increase in student enrollment for the fall 2025 term compared with fall 2024, the biggest year-over-year increase in a decade and the second consecutive year of growth. The UC system also saw record-breaking enrollment of 301,093 students in fall 2025, up 5.9 percent since fall 2021.
Still, educators note that the scars of pandemic education are still apparent, and a full recovery will take time. A study published in March 2025 by UC Berkeley found that current college students are still lagging behind previous classes in key areas, such as students assisting faculty with research and students holding on-campus jobs.
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and broader societal changes have created new challenges to learning and development. In Sharma's class, he noticed that over the past couple of years, students have moved away from using an online Q&A platform called "Ed Discussion" that allows students and professors to post questions. Now, students opt to use ChatGPT for help solving math problems, Sharma said, and he was surprised when students began "blatantly admitting" to using the AI tool.
"I don't say this to them, but it's like, of course you don't understand it because that's not the way we went over it," Sharma said. "ChatGPT doesn't understand your level. It just is searching through all math to find you an answer. That's not going to be a good way to learn it, especially because ChatGPT can't realize where you're struggling or figure out what is holding you up."
Worrell said he believes universities need to start rethinking some of their strategies, such as implementing more initiatives at the beginning of the semester to gauge the incoming class's shortcomings.
"What we are going to need to start doing in college is what we encourage K-12 teachers to do," he said. "... Doing some sort of early surveys at the beginning of the semester, early assignments, to just get a sense of base."
Worrell also said administrators at UC Berkeley have asked professors to be more explicit with students in syllabi, specifically about expectations and deadlines.
On the psychological side, Worrell said students could benefit from more open spaces to express their distresses, such as peer counselors, which have been implemented already at UC Berkeley. As professors and faculty members become more intentional in "creating a sense of belonging in the classroom," Worrell said, he believes learning effectiveness will continue its upward momentum.
"I think things have gotten better. I don't know if they are fully back," he said.
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