Basic Needs Insecurity and College Students’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

I examined the relationship between basic needs insecurity and college students’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample included 49,122 students enrolled at 130 community and technical colleges and 72 four-year institutions across 42 states in fall 2020. I used propensity score matching techniques to construct matched pairs of students who did and did not experience basic needs insecurity using covariates (i.e., individual characteristics, environmental/institutional variables, and COVID-19 experiences). The results suggest that low and very low food security and housing insecurity have significant and positive relationships with students’ odds of experiencing moderate to severe major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder symptoms, controlling for additional variables.