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Debt Stress, College Stress: Implications for Black and Latinx Students’ Mental Health

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Positive affect scales were included in analysis but did not consistently yield significant associations and so have been omitted.

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank Julia McQuillan and Dan Hoyt for the instrumental support they provided to the development of this project.

Funding

This research was generously supported by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Arts and Sciences. This research was also supported by Grant, P30AG066614, awarded to the Center on Aging and Population Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin by the National Institute on Aging, and by Grant, P2CHD042849, and Grant, T32HD007081, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 305 E 23rd St., Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Faith M. Deckard, Bridget J. Goosby & Jacob E. Cheadle

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Appendix

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See Tables 9 and 10.

Table 9 Person and time fixed effects models for educational debt stress and “college stress” for Black and Latinx students only
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Table 10 Income distribution for sample
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Deckard, F.M., Goosby, B.J. & Cheadle, J.E. Debt Stress, College Stress: Implications for Black and Latinx Students’ Mental Health. Race Soc Probl 14, 238–253 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-021-09346-z

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