Educational improvements needed to offset COVID impact

A recent report released by OECD warns massive economic losses on individual lifelong income and national growth caused by the school closures worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic would be irreversible unless our schools could do better performance than they did in 2019.

The report, called The Economic Impacts of Learning Losses, predicts the cohort of students in primary and secondary schools who suffered from school closures would face 2.6 percent in life-long career income loss and the world economy would shrink by 1.5 percent each year throughout the rest of the century. The outcomes would turn worse if schools are unable to reopen soon.

Two educational experts in charge of this report — Andreas Schleicher, OECD director for education and skills, and Eric Hanushek, an economist with Stanford University — shared their findings while joining a webinar launched by Forum for World Education, a global non-governmental organization.

According to Hanushek, the above projections are based on the best conditions. Taking the US as an example, the GDP losses within the century would reach 14.2 trillion dollars, or 69 percent of the current annual GDP. With a similar economic volume, China would face more or less the same losses in GDP.

Moreover, one paper issued by World Bank also predicted in June that without effective compensatory approaches the educational disruption would cost current students approximately 16,000 dollars each year in payment over their work life at present value. That means about a 10 trillion dollar salary decrease in total.

Apart from the clear-cut and explicit loss data, the educational experts also warned the disproportionate losses facing those students from disadvantaged households. Obviously, that group is looking at deeper reductions in salary, thus worsening an already imbalanced situation.