Students’ Mental Health and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Colleges Could Support Them Better

Transitioning to university can be challenging for young adults, and urban universities play a critical role in supporting them. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional challenges, especially for underrepresented minority (URM) students. The present short-term longitudinal study examined URM college freshmen at an urban university in Spring 2020 to investigate how the onset of the pandemic affected their psychological status, mental health, and resilience and whether these effects differed by first-generation versus continuing-generation college status, operationalized via parental educational attainment. We examined whether two pre-pandemic psychological factors, perceived stress (a risk factor) and perceived parental support (a protective factor), predicted depression and anxiety symptoms, psychological harm from the pandemic, and pandemic resilience differently by the end of the semester among first-generation and continuing-generation students (operationalized by parental educational attainment). Using linear and hierarchical regressions and moderation analyses, results indicated that perceived stress and parental support played distinct roles in students’ mental health trajectories. First-generation students reported higher levels of anxiety before the pandemic and patterns linking pre-pandemic mental health to later psychological harm differed by group. Parental support also operated differently across groups, and for first-generation students, pre-pandemic mental health was more strongly linked to psychological harm during the pandemic. Together, findings show the importance of considering students’ educational backgrounds and lived contexts when developing mental health supports at urban universities.