The Ivory Tower Lost: How College Students Respond Differently than the General Public to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In the United States, the country with the highest confirmed COVID-19 infection cases, a nationwide social distancing protocol has been implemented by the President. Following the closure of the University of Washington on March 7th, more than 1000 colleges and universities in the United States have cancelled in-person classes and campus activities, impacting millions of students. This paper aims to discover the social implications of this unprecedented disruption in our interactive society regarding both the general public and higher education populations by mining people's opinions on social media. We discover several topics embedded in a large number of COVID-19 tweets that represent the most central issues related to the pandemic, which are of great concerns for both college students and the general public. Moreover, we find significant differences between these two groups of Twitter users with respect to the sentiments they expressed towards the COVID-19 issues. To our best knowledge, this is the first social media-based study which focuses on the college student community's demographics and responses to prevalent social issues during a major crisis.

The Psychosocial Impacts of COVID-19 on a Sample of Australian Adults: Cross-sectional Survey and Sentiment Analysis

“…Statistically significant but small-magnitude associations of negative sentiment scores relative to positive scores with greater financial stress and lower Knowledge of community sentiment during public health events can inform better health outcomes by providing insights into the psychosocial and environmental drivers of human behavior and in detecting unanticipated events or trends within the community [35]. Similar to previous research [36][37][38], our findings suggest an overall trend toward neutral and negative sentiment toward COVID-19. Neutral sentiment tends to indicate lower levels of concern about COVID-19 or minimal experiences of personal impact.…”

The Impact of Demographics, Life and Work Circumstances on College and University Instructors’ Well-Being During Quaranteaching

“…Where the psychological impact of the pandemic in education was a concern, the existing literature has tended to focus on the student population. A topical analysis of tweets (Duong et al, 2020) revealed that negative sentiments toward the central issues of COVID-19 were significantly higher among students than in the general population. Khodabakhshi-Koolaee (2020) in interviews with 15 postgrad students in Iran who had experienced living in quarantine, as three of the four main emerging themes identified (i) developing negative emotions, confusion and pessimism, (ii) concerns about family health, as well as (iii) economic and social concerns and "fear of tomorrow."…”

Computer Science Students’ Perceptions of Emergency Remote Teaching: An Experience Report

“…A recent survey study of a group of Chemistry students at the University of British Columbia by [33] reveals that their experience with transitioning to ERT was mostly negative, with students complaining about lack of motivation and interaction with classmates and instructors . Another study of students' sentiment on Twitter by [14] found that college students were "likely to express negative feelings towards how social distancing and school closure are affecting their work and study environments", and a majority of them (81.3%) disliked remote learning. Common issues were difficulty learning subjects that would require physical interaction with the content (i.e., chemistry and biology laboratories) and keeping up with the course pace when attendance to weekly lectures was no longer required, as was already found in pre-COVID studies [16,31].…”