Graduate Students’ Mental Health During COVID-19

Parenting in academia can be tremendously stressful. While graduate students, in general, may experience high levels of stress, time pressure, and financial difficulties, graduate students with children confront additional burdens required by the daily needs of their children. Although studies have focused on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education students, little attention has been paid to how graduate student parents were impacted by this abrupt change. Using data collected from 543 graduate students, we examined the influence of parental status and gender on graduate students’ perceived helplessness, self-efficacy, and life satisfaction. In addition, we exclusively focused on the student-parent group and examined the effect of gender and minority status. We surveyed 543 graduate students and found a significant influence of parental status on graduate students. Graduate student parents reported higher levels of self-efficacy and life satisfaction while reporting lower levels of perceived helplessness than childless peers, partially supporting the role accumulation theory. We also identified a significant gender gap in each group. Specifically, female student parents reported significantly higher levels of perceived helplessness and lower levels of self-efficacy than male student parents. Similarly, female non-parents reported significantly higher levels of perceived helplessness and lower levels of self-efficacy than their counterpart. Furthermore, we found the levels of satisfaction were significantly different between the minority student parents and dominant student parents. Our findings highlight the importance of providing adequate resources and support to graduate students according to their status.