Except for cancelled proms and mothballed graduation celebrations, the class of 2020 largely escaped the negative impacts of pandemic school closures that wreaked havoc on younger students. As graduating seniors, their academic requirements were largely complete, and priority was given to making sure those who still needed a course or a credential got it, even if most other school functions were locked down or limited. Graduates who planned to go on to college, however, couldn’t escape Covid’s impact on post-high school plans. New research looks at California graduates to determine if and how their college enrollment patterns shifted.
A quartet of researchers from the University of California, Davis, and the University of Texas, Austin, link individual-level administrative data on hundreds of thousands of California high school graduates from 2016 to 2020 to FAFSA completion data from the California Student Aid Commission and college enrollment records from the National Student Clearinghouse. They create pooled mean data for the classes of 2016, 2017, and 2018, and compare that to the class of 2019 to craft a picture of pre-pandemic trends. These trends are then compared to enrollment pattern changes observed for the class of 2020. College enrollment data are measured at the spring semester following high school graduation (e.g., spring 2021 for 2020 graduates) to try to separate short term deferrals from actual lack of enrollment. The results are broken down by college type—in-state community colleges (two-year), the University of California system (four-year), other California state universities (also four-year), and everything else (California private colleges and any out-of-state institution, both two-year and four-year).
As may be expected, they find sizable negative effects on college enrollment for California’s graduating class of 2020. They estimate that Covid disruption lowered overall college enrollment by 7.6 percent by the spring of 2021, this on top of an already-declining rate from 2016 to 2019. Declines were largest in the community college sector (a 12.6 percent drop), for Black and Latino students (13.9 and 9.3 percent, respectively), for low-income students (10.3 percent), and for students from high schools with already-low college-sending rates. Interestingly, enrollment in the highly selective University of California system actually increased by a small but significant 4.5 percent over pre-pandemic rates. Gains were concentrated among Asian and White students and from schools that historically sent a large share of their graduates to college.
The authors conclude that those graduates who were most likely to go on to college in a normal year did not let the pandemic stop them in 2020, although many likely opted to stay closer to home than might otherwise have been the case. Many likely also deferred from fall entry to spring due to concerns over online learning or health worries, although detailed data on that question are not presented in the report. Of those graduates whose college matriculation was always less certain, however, many could well have chosen to forego the effort due to a myriad of pandemic concerns.
These findings furnish just a snapshot of the behavior of public school graduates in one state and thus may have limited generalizability. But the authors assert that California policymakers’ responses to Covid disruptions may be of wider interest. They note that the Golden State has recently passed legislation requiring all high school seniors to submit a FAFSA, expanding financial aid entitlement programs, and further increasing resources for community colleges (beyond federal aid)—all efforts to help institutions recover from the pandemic. The data indicate these are well-targeted investments…if recouping lost enrollment is the main goal. But the pandemic may have permanently altered who is going to college, what they are looking for from postsecondary education, and whether their future goals can be achieved by faster and cheaper non-institutional means such as apprenticeships or on-the-job training.
SOURCE: Scott Carrell et al., “College Canceled: What Happened to California’s High School Graduating Class of 2020?,” Educational Researcher (September 2025).
