What does the online COVID-19 transition reveal about life stressors for community college students?

Session Goals

Attendees will be able to identify the prevalence of community college students’ self-reported life stressors both before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. They will be able to describe related differences in course outcomes pre-pandemic and during the pandemic, when instruction was moved fully online.

Study Motivation

During spring 2020 when COVID-19 shifted instruction to a fully online mode, New York City was the first U.S. location hard-hit by the pandemic. Students at the City University of New York (CUNY) were some of the first U.S. students to feel significant pandemic impacts. This created pedagogical challenges for instructors concurrent with many students experiencing significant pandemic-related life stressors. Pre-pandemic research suggests community college students have reported more potentially traumatic life events than four-year students (Anders et al., 2012). Further, trauma stress has been associated with mental health issues and lower academic performance for community college students (Edman et al., 2016). We explored the extent to which life stressors that occurred in students’ lives prior to the onset of the pandemic in the spring 2020 semester related to the (online) course outcomes. A similar exploration of the extent to which life stressors that occurred after the pandemic’s onset related to their course outcomes suggests different effects of stressors occurring at these different times. We explore possible reasons and implications of both expected and unexpected results. 

Theoretical Framework

This research draws on the concept of Body Capital, which “encompasses all the resources that ‘live in the body’: physical, mental, and psychological” (Wladis & Fay, n.d.). In theorizing body capital, physical and mental health are embodied resources that are inequitably distributed across students. When stressors (negative events, chronic strains, and traumas) are measured comprehensively, their damaging impacts on physical and mental health are substantial; differential exposure to stressful experiences is a primary way that social inequalities in physical and mental health, including stress, are produced (Thoits, 2010).

Method

Students at the largest community college within the City University of New York (CUNY) were surveyed during the spring 2020 semester. A sample frame of 600 students was selected randomly from students enrolled in core STEM subjects: 100- and 200-level courses in computer sciences or computer information systems, mathematics, STEM education, and psychology. Of the 600 students recruited to participate in this study, 529 submitted a survey, for a response rate of 88.2%. Survey data were merged with institutional research data, including student demographics and course outcomes for the semester. Both linear regression and linear probability models were used for analysis. Control variables included gender, ethnicity, age, GPA, first-semester freshman status, and median household income of zip code based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. In addition to analyzing means of the survey items, we also analyzed the relationship of these measures to successful course completion using regression. Successful course completion was defined as completing the course with a C- or better, since this is the typical requirement for receiving credit in the major or transfer credit.

Results and Discussion

Our findings included expected and unexpected results. As expected, the incidence of experiencing one or more life event stressors increased from before the pandemic (77% of students) to after the pandemic started (97%). The most frequently reported pre-pandemic life stressors included the student’s own illness/injury/disability including mental health (26%), job stressors (32%), and financial issues (25%). All were eclipsed after the pandemic onset by additional factors such as illness/injury/disability/mental health of family members (45%), caring for sick family members (38%), and unemployment (56%); one’s own illness (42%), job stressors (44%), and financial issues (63%) also rose to even higher levels. The average rating students gave to the impact that these life stressors had on the time or energy they had for the college studies doubled from 3 to 5 between these two points. Thus, there was an increase in these stressors pre-to-post-pandemic, though direct comparisons between these two time periods may be misleading since the time after the pandemic onset was twice as long as before it began. The main result to note is the high incidence of stressors pre-pandemic onset. The pandemic seems to only have exacerbated what students were already experiencing, highlighting these issues which were already salient in students’ lives in ways that impacted their educational experience.

Surprisingly, larger and more significant relationships existed for stressors that occurred prior to pandemic onset than post pandemic onset. For example, students who experienced any of the life stressors investigated during the beginning portion of the semester had course outcomes that were about 10 percentage points lower than for those who did not. The same analysis for stressors post pandemic onset showed a non-significant positive relationship between having at least one stressor and outcomes. Many (but not all) stressors pre-pandemic were significantly correlated with successful course completion and the strength of these relationships was typically less strong for stressors experienced post-pandemic onset. These results support Hamza et al.’s (2021) assertion that institutions will not only need to continue to support students with preexisting stressors but also to prioritize intervention programming, including reducing issues with social isolation and other sources of stress (Fruehwirth et al., 2021), to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 on students with psychological distress. Our findings also support the relationship found in DeBerard et al. (2004) regarding early-level college students. Their results point to a pressing need for more research on the impact of personal and family health events (which were major stressors found here) on community college students’ academic outcomes, even outside the pandemic context.   

These results will form the basis of sensemaking discussion among participants during our session, wherein we will explore possible explanations for these results. One possible explanation for the results could be that the increased flexibility offered both by instructors and the fully online medium after the onset of the pandemic (Lederman, 2020) helped students experiencing life stressors better keep up with their coursework, whereas this flexibility was not necessarily accessible to students facing health challenges prior to the pandemic. (We note that this is only speculative because we have no causal data to support this conclusion.) However, it might be worth exploring offering students more flexible course policies and mediums to improve the extent to which all students who need increased flexibility, and students experiencing significant, stressful life events in particular, are able to succeed in their courses in college.

Interactivity Plan

This session will include an interactive discussion organized around a series of provocative questions grounded in our research results and intended to inspire future research and intervention direction. Attendee responses will be compared to actual outcomes found in our study, followed by probing discussions of how our intuition and knowledge from prior research and experience may translate to pandemic-era/post-pandemic student experiences. Take-aways for future research directions will be elicited, aimed at identifying interventions that could be continued or developed to support students moving forward. This interactive discussion format will help the online research community, as well as faculty, staff and administrators who support online students, understand our results and consider how they may be applied in future institutional research and campus support efforts.

References

Anders, S.L., Frazier, P.A., & Shallcross, S/L. (2012). Prevalence and effects od life event exposure among undergraduate and community college students. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 59(3). 449-457. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027753

DeBerard, M. S., Spielmans, G. I., & Julka, D. L. (2004). Predictors of academic achievement and retention among college freshmen: A longitudinal study. College Student Journal, 38(1), 66.

Edman, J.L., Watson, S. B. & Patron, D.J. (2016). Trauma and psychological distress among ethnically diverse community college students, Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 40(4), 335-342. https://doi.org/10.1080/10668926.2015.1065211

Fruehwirth, J. C., Biswas, S., & Perreira, K. M. (2021). The Covid-19 pandemic and mental health of first-year college students: Examining the effect of Covid-19 stressors using longitudinal data. PloS ONE, 16(3), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247999

Hamza, C., Ewing, L., Heath, N. L., & Goldstein, A.L. (2021). When social isolation is nothing new: A longitudinal study on psychological distress during COVID-19 among university students with and without preexisting mental health concerns. Canadian Psychology, 62(1), 20-30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cap0000255

Lederman, D. (2020). How teaching changed in the (forced) shift to remote learning. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2020/04/22/how-professors-changed-their-teaching-springs-shift-remote

Thoits, P.A. (2010). Stress and Health: Major findings and policy implications. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51(S), S41-S53. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022146510383499

Wladis, C., & Fay, M. P. (n.d.). The holistic capital model: Introducing time and body capital as sources of inequity