Students in the United States may see their lifetime earnings cut by an average of 6% to 9%, unless schools are able to make up for the learning losses they suffered during the pandemic, a Stanford University professor warned on Thursday. .
“We really don’t know how much damage has already been caused by this, because it’s not over yet,” said Eric Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna senior researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Hanushek’s comments were made during the Massachusetts Institute of Technology summit – Challenges and Opportunities in Basic Education – Covid-19.
“But what we do know is that there is an increasing cost with the remote learning time and hybrid systems we have and the lack of real classroom teaching as we knew it in 2019,” said Hanushek.
In August 2020, Eric Hanushek estimated that first to 12th grade students would lose, on average, about 3% of their previously predicted lifetime earnings. That is if all schools returned to normal in September.
Of course, they didn’t. Now, he estimates that it will average between 6% and 9% – although that average does not reflect how children with less money and less resources are likely to suffer more.
Hanushek compared the pandemic to other historic moments when students were out of normal school for long periods of time.
Students during school strikes in Argentina or post-war Germany suffered economic losses that marked them decades later, he said.
This poses serious problems for the United States’ gross domestic product. In August 2020, Hanushek predicted that GDP would be 1.5% lower on average each year for the rest of the 21st century.
Now, he estimates it will be 3% to 4% lower in the rest of the century.
This cannot be remedied by returning to the 2019 education methods whenever the pandemic ends, he warned. Instead, the educational system in the United States needs to make up for the loss of learning.