Hybrid seminar: Resilience to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Student Performance in Dutch Higher Education

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ learning progress is of great concern. So far, studies have highlighted substantial learning losses of primary and secondary school students, whereas evidence of the effects on tertiary education students is largely missing. This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ study performance in higher education using unique data on standardized test scores throughout the curriculum of Dutch medicine students. We apply a difference-in-differences approach and an event study analysis exploiting the fact that we observe the performance of students before the pandemic as well as during the pandemic. Our findings highlight the resilience of university students to the pandemic with respect to their average test performance. Yet, we do observe an increase in test scores heterogeneity, suggesting that the pandemic led to an increase in the knowledge gap between students.