TY - JOUR
T1 - Debt Stress, College Stress
T2 - Implications for Black and Latinx Students’ Mental Health
AU - Deckard, Faith M.
AU - Goosby, Bridget J.
AU - Cheadle, Jacob E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2022/9
Y1 - 2022/9
N2 - Educational debt is an economic stressor that is harmful to mental health and disproportionately experienced by African American and Latinx youth. In this paper, we use a daily diary design to explore the link between mental health, context specific factors like “college stress” and time use, and educational debt stress, or stress incurred from thinking about educational debt and college affordability. This paper utilizes data from a sample of predominately African American and Latinx college students who provided over 1000 unique time observations. Results show that debt-induced stress is predictive of greater self-reported hostility, guilt, sadness, fatigue, and general negative emotion. Moreover, the relationship may be partly mediated by “college stress” reflecting course loads and post-graduation job expectations. For enrolled students then, educational debt may influence mental health directly through concerns over affordability, or indirectly by shaping facets of college life. The window that our granular data provides into college experiences suggest that the consequences of student debt are manifest and immediate. Further, the documented day-to-day mental health burden for minority students may contribute to downstream processes such as matriculation.
AB - Educational debt is an economic stressor that is harmful to mental health and disproportionately experienced by African American and Latinx youth. In this paper, we use a daily diary design to explore the link between mental health, context specific factors like “college stress” and time use, and educational debt stress, or stress incurred from thinking about educational debt and college affordability. This paper utilizes data from a sample of predominately African American and Latinx college students who provided over 1000 unique time observations. Results show that debt-induced stress is predictive of greater self-reported hostility, guilt, sadness, fatigue, and general negative emotion. Moreover, the relationship may be partly mediated by “college stress” reflecting course loads and post-graduation job expectations. For enrolled students then, educational debt may influence mental health directly through concerns over affordability, or indirectly by shaping facets of college life. The window that our granular data provides into college experiences suggest that the consequences of student debt are manifest and immediate. Further, the documented day-to-day mental health burden for minority students may contribute to downstream processes such as matriculation.
KW - Black and Latinx students
KW - College stress
KW - Educational debt
KW - Mental health
KW - Stress process model
KW - Time use
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U2 - 10.1007/s12552-021-09346-z
DO - 10.1007/s12552-021-09346-z
M3 - Article
C2 - 35937135
AN - SCOPUS:85112351837
SN - 1867-1748
VL - 14
SP - 238
EP - 253
JO - Race and Social Problems
JF - Race and Social Problems
IS - 3
ER -