Education in the aftermath of a pandemic
A webinar co-organized by the Canadian Sociological Association's Sociology of Education Research Cluster (CSA) and the Canadian Association of Sociology of Education (CASE).
March 26, 2026 @ 12:00 PM Eastern Time
Presentation 1:
Patrick Denice, PhD, University of Western Ontario & Shahar Dangur-Levy, PhD, University of Western Ontario
Disruptions to high school math course taking trajectories during the COVID-19 pandemic
By now, much research as demonstrated the deep and lasting toll taken on students and their education by the COVID-19 pandemic. Students experienced substantial learning loss, lower test scores in math and reading, and lower rates of high school completion (Liu 2023) and enrollment in college or university. Less is known, however, about how the pandemic affected students’ math attainment, particularly as they progressed through high school. This study draws on administrative, student-level data from one U.S. state and estimates multilevel logistic regression models to address the following core research question: How did the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote instruction affect high school students’ advancement in math courses? We find that rates of advancement (that is, of taking a higher-level math course in one year compared to the prior year) decreased during the 2020-21 school year—especially among students who spent a greater share of the year in remote instruction. Findings also reveal widening gender, racial, and socioeconomic gaps in math advancement during the pandemic. These disruptions contribute to stratification in two ways: students who do not advance in one grade level are less likely to attain higher levels of math in high school generally, and the variation in disruption by gender, race, and socioeconomic status means some students fall even further behind in subsequent grades.
Presentation 2:
Kamma Andersen, PhD, University of Western Ontario
Trends in Postsecondary Enrollment in the US during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper draws on student-level administrative data from one state in the US to describe how trends in postsecondary enrollment changed during the pandemic. First, students were less likely to enroll in postsecondary institutions following high school graduation during the pandemic, and these declines were most prominent among lower-income, Hispanic, and Black students. Second, rates of sustained enrollment in both the immediate year following high school graduation and the next year fell more substantially among lower-income, Hispanic, and Black students during the pandemic than they did among higher-income and White students. Third, students made different decisions about where to enroll: higher-income, White, and Asian students increased their enrollment in public four-year schools, decreased their enrollment in private four-year schools, and were more likely to attend college in- state, whereas lower-income, Black, and Hispanic students experienced broad declines across institutional sectors and locations. These results paint a picture of growing socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequalities in whether and where students pursued postsecondary education, and highlight the unequal barriers placed on traditionally underserved high school graduates during the pandemic.