University Students’ Financial Situation During COVID-19 and Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms: Results of the COVID-19 German Student Well-Being Study (C19 GSWS)

Abstract

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on students’ financial situation as well as on their mental health.

Aim

To examine the reported change in the financial situation of German university students before and across two time points of the COVID-19 pandemic and to evaluate its associations with anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Methods

We used data from the cross-sectional COVID-19 German Student Well-being Study conducted at five German universities (N = 7203). Linear regression models were used to analyze associations between a reported change in financial situation and anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Results

Twenty-eight percent of the participants reported to have a worsened financial situation at the time of the survey compared to the time prior to the pandemic. A worsened financial situation at the time of the survey as compared to prior to the pandemic was associated with higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms reported in all three depression and anxiety scales [a 1.46 point increase on the CES-D 8 scale (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.19; 1.73), a 0.37-point increase in PHQ-2 (95% CI: 0.28; 0.46), and a 0.45-point increase in GAD-2 (95% CI: 0.35; 0.55)]. An improved financial situation, on the other hand, was associated with lower levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. As for the second change, comparing the current financial situation with the situation during the first wave of the pandemic, the associations with anxiety and depressive symptoms were broadly similar.

Conclusion

Our findings suggest that students are a vulnerable population in need of mental and financial support during times of crisis. Future research is needed to obtain insights into potential long-term effects of the pandemic on students’ mental health.

Keywords:

• higher education
• pandemic
• financial situation
• mental health
• students’ well-being

Ethics Approval and Informed Consent

The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Bremen (protocol code 2021-28-EIL), the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf (protocol code 2020-958_1), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (protocol code 2020-066), the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the University of Siegen have accepted the ethic vote of the University of Bremen. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participants who took part in this survey. Parts of the abstract of this paper were presented at the European Public Health Conference as a poster presentation with interim findings. The poster’s abstract was published under “Poster Walks” in European Journal of Public Health: https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckac130.180.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.