There is of course a lot of speculation going on about how the global pandemic is going to impact upon education. In terms of post-secondary education, we already see contingency plans being put in place for online learning into the upcoming Fall term and possibly Winter of 2021.
When this all started happening, I thought of the the Double Cohort in Ontario of 2003. I imagined it could look similar and then I saw a blog post that also used the language of the “double cohort” to describe what we might see in the coming months. However, their ideation of this Double Cohort was way different than mine.
I’m sure if you’re reading this, you’re an education geek and the term “Double Cohort” means something to you, but in case you’ve wandered into this blog without the assumed background knowledge, in Ontario, the “Double Cohort” refers to the the doubling of enrollment of first-year post-secondary students in 2003 due to the phasing out of Grade 13. Grade 13 was required to attend university in Ontario until 2002, when it was eliminated. Thus, people graduating Grade 12 and Grade 13 in summer of 2003 were both eligible to enter university in the Fall of 2003. This resulted in approximately 10,000 more first-year university students in the Fall of 2003 compared to the previous year.
Of course, the Ontario government had planned this and saw it coming. They could build the infrastructure, work with the universities and colleges to achieve enrollment targets — they had the heads up. Not so much this time, given the rudeness of this virus.
When I had thought of the analogy of the a new Double Cohort, I had imagined a case where students entering in Fall of 2020 would simply be less prepared having graduated high school without a full year of instruction. This has been one of the adjustments that post-secondary institutions have had to make since the Double Cohort – the weakened skills that students have without Grade 13 – where first year university serves to fill the gaps, particularly in liberal arts programs. That is the only analogy I had thought of. And that would only last a year at most.
However, there is apparently some thinking in other people’s “Double Cohort theories” that many incoming undergraduates will defer enrollment because attending university online as a first-year student will be seen as undesirable. Instead, they will wait out a year (?) until they can attend in person.
This is what I disagree with. I don’t think you will see this happen en masse because of the severe economic downturn of the economy. From a purely autobiographical perspective, the only reason I stayed in enrolled university classes year-round in the early 1990s in Alberta was because 1) it was the only way I could get money (student loans), and 2) there were no jobs (and I don’t mean *good jobs* — I mean ANY jobs). So enrolling in university was the only way I could actually DO anything other than move into my parents’ basement and be broke.
I do realize that Gen Z has a lot more support from parents than us bitter Gen Xers, but I also know that Gen Z is facing an extremely crappy job market – and Millennials — those poor Millennials are now experiencing their second “once in a lifetime” financial disaster. School might be their only option to bide time. And students are always trying to individualize themselves now in a saturated BA market (all universities have seminars on how to brand yourself, for example)- they probably will not see “taking a year off” to volunteer or look for nonexistent jobs to be attractive to potential future employers. If this lockdown continues, online university might be the most interesting thing they can do, to be frank.
In fact, you don’t have to look far to see that university enrollments increase during a financial downturn. This happened after the 2008 financial downturn. It is also important to note that we may also see an increase in postgraduate applications in the coming year for the same reason.
I know that there might be hesitation by some to invest so much money in an online education. Perhaps a few courses here and there on the journey of a degree program – but to start out this way? However, I would argue that a lot of these extremely large survey courses in first year are the IDEAL place for online learning, as in-person learning is done in extremely large classes (300 or more students) where individualized student attention is very limited.
So, my analogy to the Double Cohort is that students will be less prepared given they have had a pretty incomplete final year of high school, but that any drop in enrollment will be marginal. Let’s see what happens.
