This is somewhat anedotal, but I also do have numbers I've tracked for years to base this on:
I teach chemistry at a local community college. The majority of my students for the main class I teach are pre-nursing, hoping to enter the ADN/RN program at my school. This is my 3rd year at the school, but I've been teaching a similar class to a similar body of students(albeit at a big urban state school) since 2015.
This past year felt like the worst crop of students I had. Math literacy was at an elementary school level for a good chunk of my students. I've never had so many complaints about how questions I've used for years were "confusing" or "didn"t make sense" which to me pointed to poor skills in reading comprehension.
There is a 20 question pre-test/post-test we've been giving in this department for years now. I have seen a downward trend in both the pre and post scores in the last 3 years.
I wondered if it was isolated to me, but I talk to the nursing program faculty and staff all the time. They require a certain minimum score in math and language on a standardized entrance exam. As it currently stands, the fall nursing class is shaping up to be the smallest in 30+ years because scores were so low. They're offering a second chance exam sometime this month, which is something they have never done before.
Of course I can't paint with a broad brush, and my 15 student gen chem 2 class I had this past spring was by far and away the best I've had in my time here if not in my time teaching.
I could say that there's some selection bias at play particularly in college, and particularly when you look at a school like us. We do have a lot of students who come to us planning to use one of our transfer agreements(including the engineering pathway to our states' flagship university, which is a top 20 engineering school) and recognize the value and quality of education we provide. We have others that weren't able to get in anywhere else and end up here, or didn't even try because they knew they wouldn't be able to and hope through transfer agreements we're a way in to a school that they might not otherwise get. There's also the broader question of whether or not, with the job market as it is now, if students are electing to go to work right out of high school rather than go to college. Worse economies with higher unemployment tend to favor schools like us, as students can spend a few years here, not get piled in a ton of debt, and hopefully come out better prepared for the market on the other side.
Still, though, ignoring factors specific to our school, it's an anecdotal trend that faculty from all over the country at everything from other CCs like mine to Ivy Leagues in a wide range of disciplines have noticed. The best students are as good as they ever were, but pandemic learning seems to have widened the gulf between the top students and the mediocre students. The current freshman/first year class would have been high school freshmen in spring 2020 and sophomores fall of 2020. I'm afraid of what's to come in 5 years when we see students who weathered part of their elementary school years in virtual learning.
