The Heterogeneous Impact of COVID-19 on University Student's Academic Performance

In this paper we study the pandemic's effects on the academic results of a group of university level students in a Chilean School of Economics and Business. We ask whether students from better socio-economic conditions outperformed those from poorer families. The hypothesis is that higher resources in terms of studying and living conditions, internet connections, and computer access would have contributed to increasing the gap among students from dissimilar backgrounds. Results obtained are consistent with this hypothesis, especially for those students coming from public schools. Using a differences-in-differences approach with fixed effects, we find an increase of about 40-50% in course dropping-out rates and about 30% reduction in course passing rates compared with students from private schools. Given the fact that some policies, mostly benefitting poorer students were implemented during the period, we can conclude that the gap could have potentially been even larger during the pandemic. We also find evidence showing that, after controlling for socioeconomic status, women and students with lower admission scores were less affected, while no significant effect was found between regular and special admission types.