‘Unsuitable’ environments: a qualitative study of US college youth learning online while sheltering-in-place in spring 2020

ABSTRACT

In late April 2020, we asked young adult college students to describe how they were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study analyzes data from the 370 students (52.3% of all students surveyed) who chose to describe their experiences with online learning in their response. Many students, and especially students from marginalized backgrounds (e.g. women and transgender and gender diverse, LGBTQ+, low-socioeconomic position), reported diverse hardships that were induced and/or exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that affected their learning. Most of these adverse experiences were tied to students’ shelter-in-place and remote learning conditions, which we frame as ‘unsuitable environments’, that limited students from engaging academically in the same ways they might have on campus. We situate these unsuitable environments within an intersectional social-ecological model to demonstrate how students’ transformed nested environments impact academic engagement and have implications for equity within institutions of higher education – an ecological disruption whose impacts remain important to evaluate in future research on online learning in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• College students
• COVID-19
• online learning
• shelter-in-place
• higher education
• social-ecological model

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the University of San Francisco Jesuit Foundation, Fordham University’s Office of Research, and University of San Francisco Faculty Development Funds. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant number G00006454. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We would like to thank all of the students who participated in this study during an especially chaotic time. We also thank Neshat Yazdani, Tereze Nika, and Brigitte Gibbs for assistance managing the qualitative data. Chloe Nichols, Elena Maker Castro, Nina Magid, Neshat Yazdani, and Taina Quiles provided helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NSF: [Grant Number G00006454]; University of San Francisco Jesuit Foundation; University of San Francisco Faculty Development Funds; Fordham University's Office of Research.