The Economic Impacts of learning losses due to Covid-19

The pandemic has caused more than 1,700 American colleges to shut down and start studying remotely. These colleges have also given the option for students to defer their semester until later or study remotely. Most students come to college to have the college experience and to learn which they can do better in person. However, due to this, most students have deferred their college semesters causing a semester late graduation. This will cause students to complete their undergrad later which in turn will cause a lot of these students to not be available for jobs that early which in turn means there will be lesser labor available for companies to hire. This will cause productions to decrease and hence GDP to decrease as well since supply would not be able to meet the demand curve. A learning loss equivalent to one-third of a year of schooling for the current students is estimated according to historical growth relationships to mean 1.5% lower GDP on average for the remainder of the century. And this only talks about one-third of a year, and if we imagine all colleges decreasing the number of outputs of college graduates, this will surely have a huge effect on the GDP. This 1.5% loss in future GDP would be equivalent to a total economic loss of USD 14.2 trillion. The US is already in a lot of debt due to covid-19, therefore, adding these losses of GDP to the debt will cause it even harder for the economy of the country to ever make a comeback in the coming future. Do you guys think this is a genuine problem for the US economy or will it have minimized by other factors? If so, what are those factors? Citation: Hanushek, E. A., & Woessmann, L. (2020, September). The Economic Impacts of Learning Losses [PDF]. http://www.oecd.org/education/The-economic-impacts-of-coronavirus-covid-19-learning-losses.pdf