Background The relationships of college students’ learning stress, psychological resilience and learning burnout remain unclear. We aimed to investigate the status quo and relationship of college students’ learning stress, psychological resilience and learning burnout, to provide insights to the management and nursing care of college students. Methods From September 1 to October 31, 2022, students in our college were selected by stratified cluster sampling and underwent survey with the learning stress scale, college students’ learning burnout scale and the psychological resilience scale of college students. Results A total of 1680 college students were surveyed in this study. The score of learning burnout was positively correlated with the score of learning stress (r = 0.69), and negatively correlated with the score of psychological resilience (r = 0.59), and the score of learning stress was negatively correlated with the score of psychological resilience (r = 0.61). Learning pressure was correlated with the age(r=-0.60) and monthly family income(r=-0.56), the burnout was correlated with the monthly family income(r=-0.61), and psychological resilience was correlated with the age(r = 0.66) (all P < 0.05). Psychological resilience played an intermediary role in the prediction of learning burnout by learning stress, with an total intermediary role of-0.48, accounting for 75.94% of the total effect. Conclusions Psychological resilience is the mediating variable of the influence of learning stress on learning burnout. College managers should take various effective measures to improve college students’ psychological resilience to reduce college students’ learning burnout.