Effectiveness of Online Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Chinese Universities

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global shift from face-to-face instruction to online learning, posing new operational challenges for business schools, particularly in equipping students with quantitative skills essential for the labor market. Leveraging China's abrupt lockdown policies as a natural experiment, we examine the heterogeneous effects of online education on student academic performance. Using a panel dataset of 15,329 observations from 7,867 undergraduate students across nine Chinese universities over four semesters (Fall 2018 to Spring 2020), we compare academic outcomes before and during the transition to online learning. We find that online education led to an average increase of 8–11 points in mathematics scores on a 100-point scale during the pandemic. Applying principal component analysis, we identify four key policy measures that capture lockdown stringency: Stay-at-home orders, workplace closures, public transportation suspension, and public information campaigns. Stricter stay-at-home orders issued by the government reduce the effectiveness of online learning; however, these negative effects are partially offset by increased parental supervision and reduced external distractions resulting from workplace closures and the suspension of public transportation. Further, online learning is more effective for reasoning-focused courses (e.g., mathematics) than interpretation-focused courses (e.g., English), and the academic benefits of face-to-face peer interactions diminish significantly in online settings relative to offline environments. Our findings offer actionable insights for managing educational delivery during operational disruptions, highlighting the importance of tailoring online curriculum design and support systems to course content and student mobility constraints.