How the Pandemic Has Forced Educators to Expand the Definition of Student Support
School is now academic, physical, social-Emotional and economic
Consider a typical pre-pandemic school day for a 9th grade public school student— let’s call him Luis.
Luis wakes up in the morning, throws on his backpack, and heads out to the bus. He’s arriving early to school today to attend practice for the school soccer team; afterward, he and his teammates say hi to the security guards and stop to chat at his locker. Luis’s morning classes are Math (a teacher presentation followed by practice problems), Biology (a group lab project), and World History (a technology-enhanced class discussion). He grabs lunch at the cafeteria with his buds, but doesn’t feel so hot, so he stops at the nurse’s office on the way. In the afternoon, Luis has English (a peer review of their essay drafts), a free period, where he meets with a college counselor to practice for the PSATs, and Spanish (a quiz). After school, Luis goes to an after-school club before heading home on the late bus to start his homework.
In this ‘normal’ school day, Luis has not only interacted with dozens of specialized professional adults and many other students, but he has received multiple types of support:
Academic support: Trained teachers providing presentations, fostering class discussions, administering and grading quizzes, study time, practice problems, and academic counseling in multiple subjects.
Physical support: Transportation to school, a safe, clean place to learn protected by guards and metal detectors, a private locker, medical care, organized athletic practice, and lunch.
Social/Emotional support: Guidance counseling, school clubs, group projects and peer learning, a place to make and maintain friendships and peer relationships.
Economic support: Free teaching, transportation, food, medical care, test prep and textbooks, as well as free daycare for his parents and college counseling designed to improve Luis’s ability to sustain himself economically in the future.
Now, let’s look at the same day for Luis’s older sister, Alison, as she navigates her day as a state college freshman living on campus (again, pre-pandemic):
Alison wakes up in her dorm room to the sound of her roommate snoring gently. She crawls out of bed and heads to the dining hall to meet a friend for breakfast, navigating across the fields and between the many brick buildings of campus. Alison will attend three classes today (Abnormal Psychology, Neurobiology and Intro to Business Statistics), but she has lots of time in between, so she’ll spend most of it in the main campus library with her Neurobiology study group, and grab lunch with her roommate at the burger place in the student center. She also has an appointment with the campus mental health center, as she’s been feeling some anxiety and mild depression; the cold, grey winter on campus is not what she’s used to at home, and her work-study job is taking more time than she expected, but she needs it to keep her financial aid. On the way to her appointment, Alison sees tons of flyers for different clubs and events on campus; the Latinx Business Leaders club sounds pretty cool. That reminds her, Alison’s student mentor has been encouraging her to join clubs and extracurricular activities, so she’s going to try out for the Volleyball team this Friday; she’ll definitely hit up the campus gym this evening for a practice game.
Breaking it down into components, Allison has received:
Academic support: Classes from qualified professors (or more likely, adjuncts), a vast academic library, study support, tutoring, access to textbooks and materials, labs, specialized learning centers, and more.
Physical support: A safe, clean campus with living facilities, dozens of specialized physical facilities and athletics, including dorms, libraries, academic buildings, student centers and dining halls, food, medical facilities and more.
Social/Emotional support: Peer relationships (roommates, student groups, clubs, teams), mental health counseling, a student mentor, networking opportunities, relationships with teachers and professors.
Economic support: Financial aid, work-study, classes to gain remunerative skills like business statistics, and eventually a credential that will help Allison earn significantly more money throughout her lifetime.
Schools and universities serve a large variety of social purposes. They don’t - and have never - just educated students: they socialize, protect, empower, train, transport, house, heal and feed the learners they serve.
In the language of economics, schools and universities are thoroughly ‘bundled’. Luis’s biology class comes with a curriculum, a credentialed teacher, textbooks, and lab materials, not to mention he also gets a peer group, a classroom, a lab, a safe and clean school building, a cafeteria and a bus to get you there - all for one “low” price.
Allison’s tuition grants her access to a massive, safe, clean campus with dozens of specialized buildings and thousands of professors and administrators, as well as mental and physical health services, work-study and tuition assistance programs, mentoring, tutoring, transportation, and more.
Brilliant thought leaders in education like Ryan Craig (“College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education”), Laura Czerniewicz (Unbundling and Rebundling Higher Education), and Jeff Selingo (in College Unbound) have been arguing for the ‘unbundling’ of higher education for a number of years. They argue, correctly, that forcing students to pay ever increasing tuition to get all the services listed above locks many out and maintains higher education’s monopoly on social mobility.
If students have to earn a college degree to enter a ‘credentialized’ information economy, then schools should offer faster and cheaper pathways to that degree, rather than adding more complex services and passing the costs to students (and the government lenders underwriting them).
It should also be noted that the story of Allison above deviates quite a bit from the “traditional” college student In 2017, the average college student age was 26.4, and in the 2015-2016 academic year, a first-year college student was two times more likely to live with their parents than to live on-campus. As the ‘typical’ student changes, schools must unbundle their services to match changing needs. This is all absolutely right.
Many of us in edtech continue to move towards a consumer-first ‘unbundling’ of education services — take a single class from Outschool or Outlier, get a textbook from Chegg, get homework help from Brainly or Course Hero, get mental health from Mantra Health, get financial help with Raise.me or Edmit, etc.
In my opinion, the COVID pandemic added a complex twist to the ‘unbundling’ narrative.
To elaborate, COVID has added significant stressors to -12 and higher education systems, throwing everything from school lunches to athletics to student housing into complete disarray. It has caused a legitimate mental health crisis in schooling at all levels, raising levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidal ideation to new heights. College and school districts were forced to provide additional services like mass COVID testing, dorm safety, and quarantine protocols. To top it all off,classroom learning, labs, special education services, tutoring, and physical and mental health services that were once exclusively offered in person were quickly movedonline. In other words, as the world fell apart in 2020, educators at all levels started to bundle more student support services into their offerings.
The COVID crisis is (hopefully) starting to enter its last legs as a true societal disruptor, but the changes that it has wrought to schooling and support services will long outlive it. In a series of weekly articles, we will examine how the four types of student support that schools and universities provide (Academic, Social/Emotional, Physical, and Economic) have undergone massive shifts in thinking and practice based on the necessities of the COVID pandemic, and how these shifts may change the definition of schooling for years to come.
Watch this space for future musings and expertise on education, tech, and the oft complicated intersection between the two, and subscribe to be notified when my next album article drops!