Audio Quality of Edited Audio Drops after Being Saved

Consistently, I have noticed that after I edit a longer audio clip to make it shorter, or simply make any change at all to an audio clip, the resulting saved clip will drop in fidelity and bitrate.

Unfortunately, this is very noticeable when courses are published as high-quality audio will feature on one slide, and then the lower-quality EDITED clip will play immediately after:  offering the learner an uneven listening experience.

Why should the bitrate drop after editing audio files? Is there a way to prevent or control this?

In the output settings, I make sure to always set the published audio quality to the highest, but this has no bearing on individual edited clips. This is a universal setting for the output of the course.

Any ideas?