COVID took an unequal toll on college plans for minority groups. Challenges still exist

Erick Montañez visited the University of Oklahoma during spring break of 2020.

Montañez, then a junior at Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School in the Fort Worth Independent School District, loved the campus and found the environment perfect for the immersive college experience he was seeking.

But more than two years later, Montañez’s educational journey has been turned on its head by the pandemic.

During his senior year of high school, he attended online classes while working full-time. Then, without as much focus on his schoolwork and a full grasp of how to transition into higher education, he didn’t apply to universities outside of North Texas.

Montanez’s freshman year at the University of Texas at Arlington was met with academic struggles and a new responsibility to help his family financially. And now, the first-generation college student is hoping to return to college at Tarrant County College next semester, though he needs support to help him navigate the path.

Montañez said he was a student who needed guidance to transition into college – from applying for scholarships and financial aid to choosing a major – but that guidance was hard to connect with when schools went online during the pandemic.

Montañez is one of thousands of students across North Texas and nationwide who saw their college plans upended during the pandemic. Now, there are signs that more of Fort Worth’s high school graduates are finding their way to college, but many still face unique struggles.

College enrollment dips

Colleges and universities across the country saw undergraduate enrollment dip by 6.6% between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2021, according to a report released this year by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. In a separate study published in March 2021, researchers at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform found that the worst effects of the pandemic on college enrollment were concentrated among students from low-income families, students from underrepresented minority groups and students who would typically enroll in community colleges.

The study, which focused on high school graduates in Massachusetts, suggested that high school graduates in 2020 enrolled in college at the same rate as those in 2005, essentially wiping out 15 years of progress in college attainment. Researchers said those findings echoed trends in other states across the country.

Last spring, more students both in Fort Worth and across Texas completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, by late May compared to the same time year before. Typically, that would be an indication that more students are planning to go to college. But those numbers came with a ccaveat: In 2019, state lawmakers passed a new requirement that every graduating senior complete the application, whether they planned to go to college or not. That requirement took effect with last year’s graduating class, making it difficult to tell whether the uptick in FAFSA completions suggested a change in patterns or simply students and high school counselors were complying with the new requirement.

But there are other indications that more Fort Worth graduates are ending up in college. Natalie Young Williams, executive director of the T3 Partnership, said the number of Fort Worth ISD graduates who enrolled as freshmen at the coalition’s eight partner universities this fall surpassed the number who did so from the district’s class of 2019, the last class that graduated before the beginning of the pandemic.

T3, short for Tarrant To and Through, is a partnership of school districts, corporations, nonprofits, colleges and universities that seeks to boost the number of Tarrant County high school graduates who enroll in college and earn their degrees. The coalition’s higher education partners are Tarrant County College, Tarleton State University, Texas Christian University, Texas Wesleyan University, Texas Woman’s University, the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of North Texas and the University of North Texas at Dallas.

Williams said it’s unclear if the number of students from Fort Worth ISD going on to colleges elsewhere is also on the rise.

In the years to come, Williams said, it will be critical for Fort Worth city and education leaders to continue to give students as many options for achieving post-secondary credentials as possible. That should not only be through colleges and universities, but should include options such as early college high school and career and technical education programs, she said. Those can be attractive options, especially for students who need to enter the workforce as soon as they leave high school, she said.

Students still value college education

Recent research suggests that, even as undergraduate enrollment declined nationwide, students continued to be interested in pursuing higher education after high school. But many would-be college students didn’t enroll because they saw a college education as too inaccessible or expensive, according to a study conducted last fall by researchers from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for better access to higher education. The foundation published their findings in July.

Among other findings, researchers found that 85% of students who left college during the pandemic wanted to return to school, and 56% of those who dropped out before the pandemic began said they were considering re-enrolling. Forty percent of those surveyed who were never enrolled in college told researchers they’d recently considered enrolling.

Courtney Brown, one of the researchers behind the study, said the findings indicate that the reason for the downturn in college enrollments didn’t happen because Americans no longer value a college education. Many simply see a college degree as unattainable, she said.

“Finances are getting in the way,” Brown said. “People are not enrolling because they think the cost is too high.”

That’s good news and bad news for higher education, Brown said. The good news is that people still see value in going to college. The bad news, she said, is that if institutions and policymakers can’t find a way to make a college education more affordable, many potential students still won’t be able to enroll, no matter how much value they see in it.

Struggles of first-generation students

For many graduating high-schoolers in minority and low-income communities, online classes meant a lack of guidance for college applications, scholarships and making the transition into higher education.

Lizbeth Maldonado, who graduated from Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School in 2021 and is an accounting sophomore at TCU, said students in her neighborhood — one that’s primarily Latino — don’t have generational knowledge of the college experience. When high school classes went online in 2020, students lost resources on campus to help them take the next step in their educational journey.

“I feel like that’s why many of my classmates didn’t really apply to colleges,” she said.

Maldonado, who was a straight-A student and always knew she wanted to attend college, found herself detached from her schoolwork and the looming college deadlines after tragedy struck her family in the fall of 2020.

Her father died in November after contracting COVID-19, and Maldonado prioritized tending to her family over any scholarship application or assignment.

“It was really hard. The classes got even harder after, just because I had missed so much,” she said. “... I really wanted to apply to scholarships, I needed to get on track and everything all at once just piled up.”

She eventually was accepted at TCU and received enough scholarships to attend — primarily the need-based Faculty Scholarship that covers about $20,000 in annual tuition — but encountered a new, unique set of challenges as a freshman.

Having more than a year of online high school classes and then jumping into college-level courses was a jolt for Maldonado.

As the rigor and work ramped up, her struggles, combined with being a Latina in a predominantly white institution, made her feel inferior, and the events of the previous year left her with newfound anxiety.

Through family support, university resources specific for first-generation students and a Women and Gender Studies course, Maldonado has been able to better navigate her academic journey.

Maldonado said that after graduation, she hopes to start a family business with her sister, who plans to attend culinary school.

She said her father, who always motivated them to get an education and improve themselves, would be proud of the progress she and her sisters have made.

“There’s nothing in the world I want most than him looking at us to succeed,” she said.

However, she knows that isn’t the case for all the students she knew in high school.

Montañez felt like he needed more direct guidance to transition into college because soon after the pandemic began, he started prioritizing working full-time while finishing high school.

He said because of the online format, assignments and tests were still easy enough to pass without completely paying attention to lectures, making it easier to focus on things other than academics.

He also didn’t know where to begin when it came to paying for college or applying for scholarships, and didn’t take it upon himself to ask.

His freshman year of college was when he hit a wall, he said. His mom was injured in an accident and couldn’t work, so he couldn’t work less than full-time hours. He attended UTA, but commuted from Fort Worth every day. He didn’t own a laptop, so he could only do schoolwork at campus libraries, and the rigor of college classes required his full attention.

Montañez failed classes in both his first and second semesters at UTA and dropped out. He realized he needed to re-prioritize his life if he wanted to succeed academically.

He tried applying for classes at TCC, but grew frustrated with the lack of consistency from the campus advisers.

Montañez admits that his college education is in limbo. He’s hoping to apply next semester at TCC but says he needs some kind of mentorship to help him along this journey.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “And I still don’t know what I’m doing. I want to go back.”