In the period of just a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus has radically transformed the lives of masses of people around the globe, including lives of students. In this respect, this comprehensive global study provides systematic meaningful insights into students’ satisfaction and perception of different aspects of their lives during the pandemic, including their opinions on the immediate and distant future. We found that teaching staff and schools’ public relations offered students the most important support at the schools during the pandemic. On the other hand, the lack of computer skills and the perception of a relatively higher workload prevented students from perceiving a higher performance while adapting to the ‘new normal’; namely, education from a distance. During the lockdown, students primarily raised concerns about their future professional career and study issues and were mainly bored, anxious, and frustrated. They also changed some of their hygienic behaviours such as regularly wearing masks and washing hands, and daily routine habits like leaving home and shaking hands. Socio-demographic (and geographic) factors also played an important role in the students’ perception of different aspects of academic work/life as the empirical results suggest that the transition from onsite to online lectures due to the Covid-19 crisis had a stronger effect on students with a lower living standard, and students from less developed regions (in Africa and Asia), while the pandemic generally had a greater effect on students who were female, full-time, undergraduate and had financial problems with respect to their emotional life and personal circumstances. Further, in order to illuminate the factors that influence students’ satisfaction with the role of their university during the pandemic, an ordinal logistic regression was applied. The results demonstrate that more hopeful and less bored students, students who were more satisfied with their academic work/life, social science students, students with a better living standard (with a scholarship and/or the ability to pay the overall costs of study), and those who were studying in Europe showed greater satisfaction with the role and measures of their university during the COVID-19 crisis. These findings importantly call for public and higher education authorities to closely collaborate (together with other stakeholders) and urgently pay attention to vulnerable student groups while seeking to resolve the diverse, mostly negative, consequences of the prolonged COVID-19 measures around the world.

Compiled by : Mrs.Nikita D.Shinde