The heterogeneous impact of COVID-19 on university student´s academic performance

Abstract

In this paper we study the pandemic’s effects on the academic results of a group of university level students in a Chilean School of Economics and Business. We ask whether students from private schools outperformed those from public ones. The hypothesis is that higher average endowments (parents’ income and education, studying and living conditions, internet connections computer access) would have contributed to increasing the gap among students from dissimilar backgrounds. Results obtained are consistent with this hypothesis, especially for those students coming from public schools. Using a differences-in-differences approach with fixed effects, we find an increase of about 1.76 percentage points in course dropping-out rates and about 1.59 reduction in course passing rates compared with students from private schools. These are substantial magnitudes in the context of the observed gaps between school types and the transition experienced before and during the pandemic. Given the fact that some policies, mostly benefitting low-income students were implemented during the period, we can conclude that the effect could have potentially been even larger during the pandemic. We also find evidence showing that, after controlling for socio-economic status, women and students with lower admission scores were less affected, while no significant effect was found between regular and special admission types.