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Economic and Financial Aspects of Higher Education Students: Differences between the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic is responsible for the most considerable disruption to society in recent history, including higher education. To reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, higher education institutions around the world moved rapidly to transfer the teaching process from onsite to online, with e-learning adopted as a mandatory teaching process during lockdowns. This transition was not a challenge only for higher education institutions but also for higher education students, as it significantly changed the way they lived and worked and challenged their personal finances and professional career in the future. Namely, the combination of tremendous uncertainty, fear of infection, individual restraints following public guidelines and mandatory lockdowns resulted in an instantaneous decrease in overall economic activity. This is primarily due to a huge shift towards telework, which consequently reduced the number of those effectively working in all countries as companies have frozen hiring and put part of their workforce on hold through subsidized job-retention schemes. Accordingly, new unemployment claims have soared in many countries, and projections suggest that the unemployment rate will be much higher than at the peak of the global financial crisis. However, the economic fallout of the pandemic resulted not only in unprecedented job losses but also in higher intensity of precarious work. Moreover, available evidence also suggests that especially vulnerable groups – the low skilled, youth and women – as well as students, are paying the heaviest toll of the Covid-19 crisis. Since there is a little empirical evidence on the implications of the crisis on the economic and financial aspects of higher education students, the main aim of the paper is to examine the impact of the first ad second waves of the pandemic on students' personal finances and their professional career in the future. The data are derived from a comprehensive and large-scale global student survey, which was carried out online between 5 May 2020 and 15 June 2020 for the first wave and between 20 December 2020 and 30 April 2021 for the second wave of the pandemic, when most countries were experiencing the onerous restrictions imposed by the lockdown. The survey was intended for all higher education students at least 18 years of age, representing the target population of the study, who were recruited by convenience sampling facilitated by advertising on university communication systems around the world and social media. Accordingly, the final dataset consisted of 30, 383 responses from the first wave and 11, 516 responses from the second wave of the pandemic. The empirical analysis is focused on selected parts of the questionnaire related to the economic and financial aspects of higher education students. It is facilitated with descriptive statistics and established statistical techniques for identifying differences across two samples obtained in different time periods, e.g., independent samples t-test. The results reveal that still ongoing and unpredictable circumstances caused by the first wave and further deepened by the second wave of the pandemic have increased students' concerns about their financial future. More specifically, despite there being no difference in the share of students receiving a scholarship or regularly working during the academic year between the two waves of the pandemic, the results suggest that the lasting consequences of the pandemic have increased the precarious employment of students. Moreover, since many students were faced with problems related to their emotional health and, consequently, overall motivation, especially during the second wave of the pandemic, many of them were not planning to work during the academic year. Finally, the results suggest that ongoing and unpredictable circumstances caused by the pandemic have increased students' concerns about their personal finances and professional career in the future. In other words, the outbreak of the pandemic is a typical public health emergency where the high infection rate poses a huge threat to not only global public health but also to the economic and financial circumstances of higher education students. The findings provide valuable first-hand information on the impacts of the first and second waves of the pandemic on the economic and financial aspects of higher education students, and they are relevant for policymakers around the world while formulating policy recommendations and strategies to support students during this and any future pandemics.

students, higher education, personal finances, Covid-19, comparative analysis

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