COVID-19 pandemic – Years of potential intellectual life lost

During the coronavirus pandemic, teachers, professors and parents worldwide have realised that we are falling behind in education, research and intellectual progress. How much will the pandemic slow the academic progress of each country and of the world? We could borrow and modify a parallel measurement from the medical field to measure the slowdown.

‘Years of potential life lost’ or YPLL is an important calculation in medical epidemiology. Save the life of a baby in a developed country today and you have potentially saved 60 or more years of life. Save the life of an elderly person and you have perhaps given them a few more years to live.

YPLL provides a mathematical estimate of the loss of life in a population due to various accidents, diseases etc. It is based on expected average lifespan that varies from higher ages in Japan and Italy to lower life expectancies often found in countries with tropical diseases.

YPLL is estimated by identifying a standard age of survival (perhaps 65) and then calculating the lost years when a child dies from a childhood disease (if age 5, YPLL = 60). Or if an adult has a heart attack at age 50, YPLL = 15. Therefore YPLL can estimate the toll a particular illness takes on a population. This can then be considered in making decisions on funding medical research and drug development.

In the worldwide flu of 1918, which was first detected in Kansas in the United States, the average lifespan had previously been 54 for men and 48 for women. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, this most fatal of modern pandemics cost an estimated 675,000 American lives and lowered average life expectancy by 12 years.

Years of Potential Intellectual Life Lost

To assess the slowdown or fallback in intellectual achievement, it would be possible to develop a similar measure: Years of Potential Intellectual Life Lost or YPILL.

This would be a more complex estimate of the extent of damage done to a population when: 1) significant portions of a population are reduced or eliminated based on their educational level and potential to contribute intellectually to that society, 2) educational efforts for students are curtailed by school closures, war etc or when 3) academic advancement in research and publication is slowed or stopped.

There have been educational tragedies elsewhere in modern world history.

In the People’s Republic of China, from 1965 to 1977 nearly all schools were closed, resulting in a significant proportion of undereducated students. Their opening up and massive funding of education has pulled the Chinese forward dramatically, but it left behind a lost generation.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge specifically killed intellectuals including teachers, doctors and many others of their most educated citizenry. Cambodia is still recovering. And currently in the Middle East, large populations of Syrian refugees lack schooling for their children.

Similar to YPLL, all of these situations could be subjected to mathematical analysis to measure how much this loss of educated citizens slowed the intellectual advancement of future generations.

And now, as the whole world has ‘stood down’ over slightly different time periods to prevent the COVID pandemic from exceeding medical capacity, that has also meant standing down education, research and other intellectual advancement.

The testing indicator

Standardised testing would be one obvious indicator. The Organisation for Economic and Cooperation and Development or OECD has conducted cross-country education analyses using the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA test.

One analysis found that the more a country’s students use computer screens, the lower their scores. This indicates that the widespread shift from face-to-face to online education will result in a significant drop in future scores.

However, tests should be distinguished between achievement of standard knowledge gained by teaching-to-the-test and aptitude that is not readily test-prepped.

Distinctions should also be made between mathematics that is its own language and universal; science that is reality and experience-based and universal; and language and social studies that are society-based and highly variable. The inability to provide genuine lab and field experiences online also makes science a vulnerable intellectual discipline.

But there are considerably more factors involved in intellectual advancement than students and their scores on various tests.

Research

Much current research in universities has been suspended. Most laboratory and field research has come to a halt. Many research animals have been euthanised. Most sociological, psychological and political studies involving person-to-person interaction will have to start over.

National and international conferences have been cancelled. Some scientists will try to communicate online, but these will not be the critical venues where specialists have the close meaningful discussions ‘in the moment’ with each other to refine their research and design new avenues of work. This loss of communication will be difficult to measure.

With the exception of research on COVID-19 and related issues, reductions in research and in conferences will in turn result in a slowdown in publications and reductions in page counts.

There may arise concerns over acceptance of sub-standard papers or relaxed peer review. Only when research fully resumes will most research publications gear back up. We may likely see decreases in numbers of patents.

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist or the ‘spirit of the time’ also makes a difference.

In the United States, in the aftermath of the assassinations of JF Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the scores on the SAT dropped 49-points between 1963 and 1977.

While there was an increase in test-takers each year, from 2.7 million to 4.2 million students, cutting deeper into the student pool was not the reason for this steep decline. The student population remained 11th and 12th grade students. Test standards did not change.

A subsequent study pointed to the ‘national disruption’ detailed in the 1977 College Board report On Further Examination. Simply, in contrast to the post-war euphoria where America was ‘on a high’, after the assassinations America dropped into a funk. Will the effect of this worldwide ‘stand down’ result in a similar educational ‘mental depression’ that we can measure?

While there is a heavy focus on this year’s high school and college graduates, we must remember that the whole current school and higher education student population has been short-changed. There will therefore be a whole generation of school and higher education students who may have skills and knowledge that are up to a semester less – and perhaps more in countries where shutdowns will continue into the next school year.

And even if students early in the education pipeline are provided extra face-to-face class time for makeup, it is likely that such losses cannot be fully made up. Development does not stand still and windows for learning close.

Combinations and variations

A measurement of YPILL that combines indicators of the loss in educational advancement with measures of the slowdown in research and publication would of course vary across the many developed and under-developed countries during normal times since the educational and research capacity of countries varies due to their history and economics.

These relationships will also be altered due to quarantine restrictions on human movement and changes in immigration. For instance, the US has come to rely heavily on foreign students educated in the US remaining in the US and making up a significant portion of our engineering, physics, chemistry and molecular biology science infrastructure.

Eugene Garfield was a pioneer in bibliometrics, and if alive today, he might very well have proposed something similar to YPILL. Bibliometrics will already be able to quantify the decline in research publication. Similar metrics could put numbers on the related slowdown in pre-publication research.

Measuring the erosion in our students’ education poses more difficulty. Test scores may detect student achievement levels in some disciplines but cannot directly reveal the decrease in creativity or the loss of spirit. And YPILL indicators may be found more easily in the maths and sciences, while assessing the state of fine arts and humanities is a different challenge.

Just as YPLL does not dominate medical epidemiology but serves to give an overall assessment of how medical interventions have an important effect on lifespan, the concept of YPILL can serve to provide a general measurement of how much the COVID-19 pandemic will slow intellectual advancement worldwide.

John Richard Schrock is editor of the Kansas School Naturalist at Emporia State University in the United States and also teaches various classes at universities in China.