Challenges

When a pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization in March, 2020, Karmachary, Paudel, and Adhikari (2020) noted that around 181 countries in the world have held back their education system till 1st May 2020 for 73.5% (1.3 billion young people) of enrolled learners worldwide. Browse more...

International students across the globe have had their academic plans altered. In China, Leung, Khan Saif and Chung (2021) write, foreign students are still not allowed into China to resume classes, but even elsewhere in the region, new coronavirus variants emerging in the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa have led to new precautions on allowing in foreigners, including enrolled students. Browse more...

As of April 2021, there have been over 130 million cases of the Covid-19 reported, with almost 3 million leading to death. At this time, it is difficult to empirically determine how the virus has physically impacted students on a global scale. However, there has been a large amount of discussion about the psychological toll that students have experienced as a result of the pandemic. Case in point, Finnish schools have been using the #eijakseta hashtag on Instagram to call attention to the idea “Survival does not mean well-being”. This calls attention to the fatigue and mental strain students in Finland, as well as around the world, have experienced in the emergency transition to distance learning. Students in Finland are not alone. Sun, Goldberg, Lin, Qiao & Operario (2020), examined the impact of state mandated lockdowns on Chinese students. Of the almost 2000 responses, “Psychiatric symptoms were alarmingly prevalent: 67.05% reported traumatic stress, 46.55% had depressive symptoms, and 34.73% reported anxiety symptoms. Further, 19.56% endorsed suicidal ideation.” In a study of all French University students, 69,054 students completed the survey. Most of the respondents were women (50,251 [72.8%]) and many were first-year students (32,424 [47.0%]). The students reported a prevalence of suicidal thoughts 11.4% (7891 students), severe distress (22.4% (15,463 students), high level of perceived stress 24.7% (17,093 students), severe depression 16.1% (11,133 students), and high level of anxiety 27.5% (18,970 students). Among the 29,564 students who reported at least 1 mental health outcome, 3675 of them said they had seen a health professional.

Covid caused many businesses to pause (some permanently). In order to ensure that people would maintain physical distances from each other. Places where people could congregate, such as restaurants, shopping plazas, and libraries, closed. In order to minimize spread, people around the world were encouraged or mandated to stay at home, which meant (in some cases) they could not go to work, or had to work from home. In some cases, governments provided unemployment insurance or living subsidies to ensure people were able maintain basic necessities in their lives, such as food, and shelter. Students in many parts of the world were especially susceptible to financial hardships due to the nature of being a student. While in school, traditional students forego working full time in order to maximize their efforts to obtain good grades. This means that students from low-income households, they rely on income from jobs on or near their campus to make ends meet. Many of these opportunities for employment disappeared during the pandemic. Levin (2020) reported: “Trapped between the financial hardships of the pandemic and the technological hurdles of online learning, the millions of low-income college students across America face mounting obstacles in their quests for higher education. Some have simply dropped out”. Gao (2020) explains, “some college students have seen their parents laid off, lose jobs or close businesses — major events that have shaken their family finances. That’s forced some to have to jump in earlier than expected to help their family financially. And, it’s caused them to really take a hard look at their dreams.”. While the price of services stayed the same for students, some universities have raised tuition to stay afloat during this time period. For example, in Zimbabwe: Mashinings (2020) details, ”..state universities have increased tuition fees by up to a massive 450%, in a development which students said was insensitive, considering the economic crisis in the country”). Some students felt they had been shortchanged for the semester. “Students at University of California campuses and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts have echoed similar concerns about tuition not adding up to the education they were promised. Students at Miami and Drexel Universities filed a class action lawsuit for tuition refunds, but most colleges have generally been offering refunds on room and board fees, not tuition”((Anderson, 2020) .