Artificial Intelligence-Based Analytics for Impacts of COVID-19 and Online Learning on College Students' Mental Health

COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), was first found in Wuhan, China late in the December of 2019. Not long after that the virus spread worldwide and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. This caused many changes around the world and in the United States. One of these changes was the shift towards online learning. In this paper, we seek to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic and online learning impact college students' emotional wellbeing. To do this we use several machine learning and statistical models to analyze data collected by the Faculty of Public Administration at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in conjunction with an international consortium of universities, other higher education institutions and students' associations. Our results indicate that learning modality (face-to-face, online synchronous, online asynchronous, etc.) is the main predictor of students' emotional wellbeing, followed by financial security. Factors such as satisfaction with their university's and government's handling of the pandemic are also important predictors.