Most of the conversation and research on learning loss over the pandemic has been on K-12 students. Hard to believe, but some of those students are now juniors in college.

How are they doing?

1/n My sense, from talking to colleagues (read: a non-random selection of profs at a non-randomly selected uni) is that *on average* college students whose studies were affected by pandemic are not doing as well academically as previous cohorts in the same courses.

2/n

Regrets? Not so fast.

A 🧵on the @washingtonpost article on college majors, based on poking around in the data on which most of it is based - the Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decision-making.

Data: federalreserve.gov/publications/f…

Story:
washingtonpost.com/business/2022/… 1st glaring problem: article is framed around "regret," but this word (or its derivatives) DOES NOT APPEAR in the survey. As anyone who has worked w/ surveys knows, even tiny variations in question wording can have large impacts on observed frequency of response values.

2/n

Universities need to plan now for how they will protect instructors - disproportionately women, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous scholars, & adjuncts - who teach courses on race and racial inequality from harassment, doxxing, threats, and organized campaigns to get them fired. 1/5 The toll on faculty who teach *required* anti-racism courses likely to be especially high. Many students won't want to be there, creating negative energy in class. Some will take out ire at requirement on instructor; a few may be overtly hostile. Just exhausting. 2/5

Hard to believe but in academic time, fall 2021 is just around the corner. Delays in vaccination program make this extremely challenging for universities, in many ways more challenging than planning for F2020 or S2021 was.
A #highereducation 🧵
1/6 Do unis assume herd immunity and business as usual by f21? Yay, let's go back to in-person classes w/ no physical distancing, normal dorm capacity! But, it's a risky bet, because much harder to pivot at last minute from normal -> covid than reverse. Hello, contingency plans. 2/6

How did shift to hybrid instruction affect the network of college students connected through their face-to-face classes?

New paper with Ben Cornwell & @barum_park forthcoming in @SociologicalSci . Page proofs & R code: osf.io/kw9pf/

1/7 Study based on @Cornell data from Fall 2020, when uni went to hybrid instruction. Roughly 28% of class meetings in person.

A few results:
1) Fall 2020 face-to-face network connected a much smaller share of students: about 47% in F2020 vs. 100% in F2019.

2/7

There are two simultaneous shocks to the sociology job market this year: 1) a precipitous decline in the number of positions; and 2) a discontinuous shift in the share of positions in different areas within the discipline.

1/8 In sociology, a much higher share of positions (inc. postdocs) this year are for scholars of race. This shift is understandable given the times, BLM, and renewed internal and external pressure on universities to diversity the curricula, the faculty, or both.

2/8

Unis planning in-person or hybrid terms don't want to go all-in on formal surveillance and policing to enforce behavioral expectations or rules. Instead, they are putting faith in informal social control (usually framed benignly as norms) and community or self-"policing." 🧵1/9 I get it. Few faculty, staff, or students want campuses to be mini-police states where a mask violation turns into an interaction b/n campus police & violator. Most understand that this sets stage for abuse, both by police and by community members thru false reports. 2/9

When I saw Cornell's epi model, I had many of the same reactions as @WStevenHolbrook. (I was on the committee that wrote the reopening report, but a different sub-committee from the one that wrestled with health concerns and did the epi modeling.)

https://twitter.com/WStevenHolbrook/status/1278314549817544704

1. A lot of faith being put on results from a student "survey." Survey was always intended to be quick-and-dirty snapshot of opinions, not one that meets social science standards. E.g., no attention to response rates, nonrandom missingness, question wording/ordering, etc.

In normal times, connections between students on a college campus are an asset. During a pandemic, they are not.

My paper with Ben Cornwell on the structure of course enrollment networks @Cornell now out @SociologicalSci (#OA): sociologicalscience.com/articles-v7-9-…

1/n I've tweeted about this paper before, but thought it'd be useful to update now that paper is peer-reviewed & published.

Teaser for regular readers: last tweets in today's thread reflect on findings in light of "reopening" conversation of last week+. 2/

https://twitter.com/WeedenKim/status/1258894522127396866

Should universities resume face-to-face instruction in fall? Ben Cornwell and I posted a working paper with relevant evidence from @Cornell on the structure of enrollment networks that connect students and classes.

Summary in thread, preprint here: osf.io/6kuet/
1/11 Course enrollment networks are small-world networks, with high clustering and short average path lengths. Although only small share of students are connected directly (in same class), nearly all students are connected indirectly through a third student.

More details...
2/11

At this point in the term, terrible things, such as a grandmother's death, happen to our students at unnaturally and alarmingly high rates. As instructors, we suspect some excuses are false, but we don't know which ones.

It doesn’t matter.

A story, with a point at the end
/1 Back in 5th-ish grade, my teacher became fed up with students' excuses for why we didn't complete our homework. She had just cause: it had turned into a game, with a group of students daring each other to come up with excuses and try them out on her.
/2

I can’t stop thinking about #WhyIDidntReport. The stories are deeply personal but in some ways universal: not because all women have been raped, but because most of us have experiences stemming from the same culture. I don’t often share personal stuff on Twitter, but here goes. 2/14

Start with the catcalls and crude propositions. A fact of life, older girls said. Take it as a compliment, boys said. But a compliment shouldn't make the world go black around the edges, nor make you look over your shoulder out of fear you're being followed.