The Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education Created by the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: James Knight
Tags: Teaching, Covid 19, Mental Health, Burnout, Higher Education

Summing up my years as an undergraduate student, a graduate student for two degrees, a post-doctorate, and a faculty member, I have spent 54 years in higher education. Based on my experience as a faculty member over the past 45 years who has taught approximately 9,000 students and developed an extensive research portfolio, I have a deep understanding of both students’ and faculty’s needs and challenges. My bottom line assessment: higher education is seriously in crisis.

Faculty burnout

According to the World Health Organization, which includes the occupational phenomenon in its International Classification of Diseases, burnout is a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” The primary symptoms are feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental “distance” from or cynicism and negativity toward one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.

According to a recent study of faculty mental health from Course Hero, a U.S educational technology company that operates an online learning platform for students, pandemic stress in faculty, while significant as early as March 2020, is now a record peak. The study examined how the pandemic has affected faculty views toward the academic work environment and job satisfaction.

“The pandemic has had far-reaching implications on the day-to-day work of faculty, as well as on their long-term career trajectories, professional aspirations, and views on the future of higher education,” said Tara Graham, Vice President of Educator Community and Partnerships at Course Hero. “Student success is tightly linked to the mental and emotional health and professional success of instructors. This research signals an urgency to expand the types of support offered to both students and faculty during this extraordinary time in education.”

According to the study, 74% of faculty reported significant stress due to challenges transitioning to new teaching modalities — the largest single source of stress for educators by a wide margin. Nearly two-thirds said that challenges meeting the emotional and mental health needs of students caused significant stress. While stress was high at the onset of the pandemic, the research found that faculty anxiety appears to be increasing, with more faculty reporting peak stress now than at the beginning of the pandemic.

Most significantly, more than 40% of faculty survey respondents reported that they have considered leaving their jobs as a result of COVID-19. The percentage was even higher in early-career faculty members, with 48% reporting that they are considering leaving.

Christopher L. Caterine, a former visiting assistant professor at Tulane University who left academe before COVID-19 and wrote a book about how to do it, reported in an interview with the publication Inside Higher Education that he could easily see how the pandemic exacerbated an already stressful work environment.

“I think the job is just becoming too much to bear,” he said. “It was high risk, low reward after 2008, and COVID-19 has made the entire situation unsustainable. So, I’ve seen lots of interest in my book and Q&A sessions from grad students, but also contingent folk and tenure-trap faculty.”

Catherine also states, “research jobs are low-impact and relatively low paying in most disciplines. Higher education is so far behind other sectors on compensation, support, and satisfaction that the pull of those base quality-of-life measures is finally strong enough to break the spell of feeling academia is a vocation.”

Overwhelmingly, professors said the pandemic had made their jobs more difficult, with 54 percent strongly agreeing and 33 percent agreeing.

Not surprising to me, “new modes of teaching” were a significant source of stress for three out of four survey respondents.

The long-term effect of COVID-19 on higher education

In the Course Hero study, faculty reported concern that, even after the country gains more control of the pandemic, changes to higher education will be permanent. Nearly two-thirds expect diminished perceptions of the value of higher education, and more than 40 percent expect an increased economic divide between students who go to elite, in-person colleges and those who attend online or part-time programs. Among other key findings, the research reports the following faculty concerns:

Looming closures and cuts. One in four faculty members is concerned that their institution or department may close permanently due to the pandemic or the economic crisis that it has created. Nearly half expect long-term closures or mergers with other campuses, while 60 percent expect institutions will cut academic programs or courses of study (60%).

The permanent new normal. Three-quarters of faculty expect changes in class size, teaching modality, or other shifts that make it more difficult to provide high-quality teaching and meaningful relationships with students.

Faculty Mental Health & Job Satisfaction

Difficulty on the job. Faculty overwhelmingly believe that the pandemic has made their professional lives more challenging, with 54% strongly agree and 33% in agree that their job has gotten more difficult because of COVID-19.

Coping with a stressful environment. More than half of faculty also reported significant stress from frustration with the decisions of the administration at their institution (53%), personal matters such as child care or financial concerns (57%), or other world events such as the election or social unrest (65%).

Faculty report signs of burnout. More than half of faculty reported a significant increase in emotional drain (53%) and work-related stress or frustration (52%), both of which are highly correlated with burnout.

Help from the administration. To improve their current level of job satisfaction, faculty named increased compensation (53%), modifications to teaching schedule or load (46%), new technology or better access to technology support (34%), and increased staff/teaching assistant support (26%).

Loss of campus community. Three-quarters of faculty also reported a decrease or significant decrease in connection to colleagues and connection to students.

Faculty-administration divide on job satisfaction. Only 15 percent of faculty agreed that administrators understand the difficulty that faculty face in managing their workloads. Half of the faculty feel a decrease or significant decrease in appreciation by my institutional failure, and 60 percent.

Secondary Trauma

Another significant source of stress, for two-thirds of professors surveyed, was meeting the emotional and mental health needs of students who are also struggling.

As was pointed out in this article, “faculty have been thrown into the role of front-line emergency counseling. They aren’t trained, paid, or qualified to do that work. It puts them and students at risk, including for secondary trauma among professors.”

A personal observation

It is the professors who actually care about their students who end up receiving the lion’s share of reflected student stress. I have always been a very approachable teacher who made it a point of genuinely getting to know my students as individuals and not just a faceless name and student identification number. Long before COVID-19, students came to me to discuss their personal as well as their academic problems. They continued to confide their COVID-19 struggles with me, although now mostly by email and Zoom chats rather than in person.