"… Making decisions about the fall semester can be even more complicated for students now in college. To start, students say they’re facing an onslaught of doubt that they haven’t really been learning online, despite the debt they’re racking up. Then there are more existential concerns. Some students lacked access to secure housing back home, Lewis said, so being forced to leave the dorms in the middle of the semester proved a problem. Others didn’t have a reliable internet connection at home, which made digital learning even harder.
Those are the same worries expressed by the at-risk high-schoolers and college students who work with Bottom Line, a college advocacy group that works with students in New York City, Chicago and Boston, including Huynh. But of the roughly 1,000 high school seniors the agency is working with, only six so far have said they don’t plan to attend college, said Steve Colón, the executive director." …