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Due to ethical and practical concerns, no large representative randomized controlled trials comparing outcomes in fully online versus face-to-face courses have occurred. However, the circumstances presented by the COVID-19 pandemic created a unique opportunity to explore hypotheses about the relationship between the online course medium and course outcomes. The City University of New York (CUNY) was one of the first large U.S. public universities to shift all courses completely online. This study used a dataset consisting of all courses taken by students enrolled in either fall 2019 or spring 2020 at any of the two and four-year colleges of CUNY to determine whether taking online courses affect course completion rates. Findings show that both two- and four-year colleges, students were significantly less likely to successfully complete fully online than traditional mode courses. Moreover, within the same term, students were less likely to successfully complete courses that they originally chose to take fully online than in-person, regardless of whether those courses were then subsequently taught fully online or not. Students were also significantly more likely to take elective courses fully online and significantly more likely to take major requirements as traditional courses; they were roughly equally likely to take distributional requirements as fully online or traditional courses. Courses that were either elective or distributional requirements had significantly lower rates of successful completion than major requirement courses. 

Background or Context:The COVID-19 pandemic may be considered a focusing event that has drawn greater attention to the physical and mental health of community college students. Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study:This study examined community college students’ self-reported life stressors pre- and post-pandemic-onset to identify any reported differences, both in occurrence and in impact on course completion. Research Design:Surveys were collected after the COVID-19 pandemic onset at the City University of New York’s largest community college. The 529 students enrolled in STEM subjects were asked about potentially stressful life events experienced during spring 2020 and how strongly these impacted the time or energy they had for their studies (response rate 88.2%). Conclusions or Recommendations:Students’ reporting of the presence of life stressors, as well as their rating of the impact on their studies, were significantly predictive of subsequent course outcomes. However, stressors reported as beginning prior to the pandemic had a larger and more significant relationship with course outcomes than those reported as beginning after pandemic onset. Further, stressors were already highly prevalent prepandemic, with over three-quarters of students reporting them. Although the pandemic may have drawn attention to the existence and impact of stressors, it may simply be a focusing event that drew heightened attention to a pre-existing issue. Results from this study indicate that life stress may significantly impact the outcomes of community college students even outside of pandemic conditions, suggesting that this is a critical area for community colleges to address. 

Despite more focused attention in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, high online attrition remains both a concern and a mystery; gaps in our knowledge exist as to why students so often do not complete online courses. Pre-pandemic, and using a sample of 780 students who dropped out of fully online courses (or the same course face-to-face) from a large university system in the Northeast U.S., students were explicitly asked about their specific reasons for course withdrawal. All students enrolled in a fully online course (or a face-to-face section of the same course) at the City University of New York (CUNY) in fall 2015 were invited to take the online survey from which this study data was taken. Results indicate that there were distinct differences in the patterns of reasons given by online and face-to-face students: although the perceived quality of the instructor/instruction was deemed important to student persistence in both modalities, it seemed to be of greater importance face-to-face than online. Furthermore, issues related to time were found to be more prominent reasons for dropping for online learners than face-to-face learners. Findings from this study shed new light on the impetus for online attrition, with implications for online policy and course design in a post-pandemic era. 

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning had become a fundamental part of post-secondary education. At the same time, empirical evidence from the last decade documents higher dropout online in comparison to face-to-face courses for some students. Thus, while online learning may provide students access to post-secondary education, concerns about academic momentum and degree attainment dominate the higher education online learning landscape. Because course completion is often used as a measure of effectiveness, there is a strong need for institutions to be able to predict the potential persistence of online students to direct efforts towards ameliorating dropout. Yet currently, a widely tested and validated archetypical predictive model of retention and success does not exist for undergraduate online learning. This integrative review of the literature examines evidence gathered over the last decade, organizing and summarizing major findings, to help identify potential undergraduate student characteristics for inclusion in such a model. The body of literature collected in this review suggests ten factors for consideration. 

Student parents are among the least likely student groups to complete college. Regression models were run using 2003–2019 American Time Use Survey data to explore time poverty among college students. Results indicate that students with children under 13 years had significantly less discretionary time and free time, spent significantly less time on their education, enrolled part-time at significantly higher rates, and spent significantly more time studying while simultaneously caring for children, compared with students without children under 13 years. The strength of these relationships was strongest when children were younger. Parents with children under 6 years, and mothers of children of all age-groups, had significantly higher time poverty than other groups, yet spent significantly more time on education after controlling for discretionary time, at the cost of significantly less free time for themselves. Results suggest that improving college outcomes for student parents may require consideration of time poverty. 

This study details the prevalence of community college students’ reports of serious health events both before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. Survey responses from a representative sample of students within the largest community college at the City University of New York highlighted serious health challenges. Findings indicated that serious health challenges (including illness/injury/disability/mental health) were a significant factor in predicting students’ outcomes during the spring 2020 term. However, health-related events that occurred prior to the onset of the pandemic had a substantially and significantly larger correlation with course outcomes than those that occurred after the onset of the pandemic. This suggests that serious health issues may be a major barrier to student progress at community colleges, even outside of the conditions of a global pandemic, and that the pandemic may have only exacerbated this significant but often overlooked preexisting issue.