How the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped demographic variation in mental health among diverse engineering student populations

ABSTRACT

Mental health issues have long posed a challenge on university campuses. While no population is immune, research has shown that students from marginalised backgrounds can have higher rates of mental health issues and suffer worse outcomes as a result. These discrepancies have been attributed to everything from different cultural norms to the micro-aggressions and other barriers that students from marginalised populations face on university campuses. With the onset of COVID-19 in the United States, many residential universities switched to a remote learning model, fundamentally changing the relationship between students, campus, family support. This work uses survey data from students in the United States to explore how COVID-19 affected mental health issues among students from different backgrounds. While the pandemic drastically increased rates of depressive disorder among all respondents, discrepancies between mental health rates for women and Hispanic/Latinx compared to men and White respondents either decreased or disappeared. Additionally, respondents identifying as Asians were less likely to screen positive for several mental health conditions than White, Non-Hispanic respondents. These findings may point to important new insights about the ways in which engineering education undermines some groups’ mental health.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental health
• COVID-19
• pandemic
• gender
• ethnicity
• disability

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank their colleges, and their Institutional Review Boards for helping to make this research possible. They would also like to thank their student participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work of Andrew Danowitz was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants EEC-1929478 and EEC-2029206. The work of Kacey Beddoes was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants EEC-1929484 and EEC-2029206. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions orrecommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflectthe views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Andrew Danowitz

Kacey Beddoes is a Project Director in the College of Engineering Dean's Office at San Jose State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech, along with graduate certificates in Engineering Education and Gender Studies.

Kacey Beddoes

Andrew Danowitz is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Engineering, California Polytechnic State University. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.