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Background or Context:The COVID-19 pandemic may be considered a focusing event that has drawn greater attention to the physical and mental health of community college students. Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study:This study examined community college students’ self-reported life stressors pre- and post-pandemic-onset to identify any reported differences, both in occurrence and in impact on course completion. Research Design:Surveys were collected after the COVID-19 pandemic onset at the City University of New York’s largest community college. The 529 students enrolled in STEM subjects were asked about potentially stressful life events experienced during spring 2020 and how strongly these impacted the time or energy they had for their studies (response rate 88.2%). Conclusions or Recommendations:Students’ reporting of the presence of life stressors, as well as their rating of the impact on their studies, were significantly predictive of subsequent course outcomes. However, stressors reported as beginning prior to the pandemic had a larger and more significant relationship with course outcomes than those reported as beginning after pandemic onset. Further, stressors were already highly prevalent prepandemic, with over three-quarters of students reporting them. Although the pandemic may have drawn attention to the existence and impact of stressors, it may simply be a focusing event that drew heightened attention to a pre-existing issue. Results from this study indicate that life stress may significantly impact the outcomes of community college students even outside of pandemic conditions, suggesting that this is a critical area for community colleges to address. 

Abstract Existing qualitative research in higher education on students’ work and family commitments already suggests that time as a resource for college is likely not distributed equitably by race/ethnicity or gender. However, the relationship between race/ethnicity, gender, and time as a resource for college has yet to be quantitatively measured in large-scale higher education research. This study explored whether gender or race/ethnicity correlated with differences in time as a resource for college; and further, the extent to which differences in time as a resource for college may be explained by other factors such as age, number of children, and access to childcare. Retrospective survey responses (n = 41,579) on self-reported time use were merged with institutional data records from students at the City University of New York (CUNY), a large diverse public university in the U.S. Women, Black, and Hispanic students were all significantly more time poor than male, White, or Asian students. Age accounted for significant portions of these differences, perhaps because it correlates with increased work and family responsibilities. Having children as well as a student’s access to childcare also explained a significant portion of inequitable distributions of time as a resource for college. 

We present a model of capital that expands existing models to introduce two new forms of capital (time and body capital) as sources of inequity in education. The aim is to (a) make visible core resources that are relevant to educational outcomes and also (often hidden) sources of inequity, (b) identify commonalities across diverse empirical and theoretical research strands, and (c) reconceptualize existing research from an asset rather than deficit framework. We explain how time and physiological resources can be conceptualized as forms of capital and link this to extant empirical and theoretical research across fields. Then, we describe how students may have different amounts and types of time and body capital, as well as different drains on capital, and how this may lead to educational inequities. We close by describing the affordances of using this theory as a lens for analyzing existing educational structures, policies and practices. 

Existing research demonstrates gender- and race/ethnicity-based inequities in college outcomes. Separately, recent research suggests a relationship between time poverty and college outcomes for student parents and online students. However, to date, no studies have empirically explored whether differential access to time as a resource for college may explain differential outcomes by gender or race/ethnicity. To address this, this study explored the relationship between time poverty, gender or race/ethnicity, and college outcomes at a large urban public university with two and four year campuses. Time poverty explained a significant proportion of differential outcomes (retention and credit accumulation) by gender and race/ethnicity. More time-poor groups also dedicated a larger proportion of their (relatively limited) discretionary time to their education, suggesting that inequitable distributions of time may contribute to other negative outcomes (e.g., reduced time for sleep, exercise, healthcare). This suggests that time poverty is a significant but understudied equity issue in higher education.