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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. 

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.