Learning in lockdown: University students’ academic performance during COVID-19 closures

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, South African higher education institutions closed and rapidly moved to implement remote learning solutions. Many students lacked access to data and learning devices, and structural inequalities shape the household environments to which many students returned – and in which they were expected to learn new academic material. To date, there has been a paucity of research quantifying the effects of the pandemic on learning loss and academic outcomes among South African university students. Therefore, we explore changes in university students’ academic outcomes during the pandemic using longitudinal, administrative data from the University of Cape Town. We estimate a difference-in-differences model in which we allow for the effect of the pandemic on students’ outcomes to differ by their academic performance in previous years as well as their socioeconomic status. Results show that although performance improved on average in 2020, this was driven by performance gains at the bottom end of the grade point average distribution. Furthermore, performance gains made in 2020 are reversed in 2021, suggesting academic performance improvements in 2020 did not reflect true learning gains. Of particular concern, however, is a widening achievement gap between NSFAS-funded students and students not funded by NSFAS in 2021, suggesting household inequalities are playing out in student performance differentials to a greater extent since COVID-19.