2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Impact of financial anxiety and financial stress on the financial well-being of engineering graduate students in the United States

Presented at GSD 4: Stressors and Supports

Financial well-being plays an important role in the mental health of graduate students. This paper aims to identify the literature that examines the consequences of financial anxiety and stress experienced by graduate students on their overall well-being. Among 2019 college graduates, 69 percent had student loans, and today there are about 43 million students with outstanding federal student loan balances (Dalton & Dalton, 2021). This study focuses on graduate students in engineering, with a specific focus on master’s level students, experiencing financial stress and financial anxiety due to high tuition fees, room, board, books, supplies and transportation, among other expenses. Very few of them manage to obtain scholarships and assistantships to support their living, and a large number of students rely on student loans, which increases their financial anxiety and stress to repay the loans after graduation, along with the pressure of securing jobs.

The purpose of this work-in-progress study is to investigate existing literature on the overall well-being of engineering graduate students at master’s degree level, with a focus on financial anxiety and financial stress related to student loans. Prior studies have focused on undergraduate students and master’s students remain an understudied segment within the research. Among graduate students, doctoral students mostly manage to obtain assistantships, but master’s level students often do not receive such financial assistance. A scoping review will be conducted using the databases such as Scopus, EBSCO, and others, to analyze the current state of research, identify gaps and highlight the need for future work.

The study has implications for, first, students in master’s programs to improve their well-being; second, it will contribute to the literature on strategies that students use to cope with financial stress; and finally, the study will generate knowledge for leadership in colleges and educational institutions to better understand students’ financial situations.

Authors

RAVISHA CHUTANI University of Georgia [biography]

I am a second-year PhD student majoring in Financial Planning in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Georgia.
VARUN KATHPALIA University of Georgia [biography]

Varun Kathpalia, born and raised in northern part of India, joined EETI as a PhD student in the Spring of 2024.
He completed his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Chitkara Institute of Engineering and Technology (Punjab Technical University, India) and master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in Manufacturing & Materials Science Engineering, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. He has over 4 years of corporate experience with companies such as Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt. Ltd. and Saint-Gobain India Pvt. Ltd. (Research & Development). His interest in areas such as improvement in instructional techniques, faculty perspectives and teaching methodologies, drove him towards the domain of Engineering Education. Specifically, the question of how engineering education can be made more effective and engaging fascinated and motivated him to pursue research in this domain.

He is working with his major professor on an NSF funded project dealing with communities and relationships that enable and empower faculty and students in engineering.
Dr. John Ray Morelock http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8043-5060 University of Georgia [biography]

Dr. Morelock is an Assistant Professor of Practice with an emphasis on engineering education research, and the Associate Director of Educational Innovation and Impact for UGA's Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI). In addition to coordinating EETI’s faculty development programming, Dr. Morelock conducts research on institutional change via faculty development, with an emphasis on innovative ways to cultivate and evaluate supportive teaching and learning networks in engineering departments and colleges. He received his doctoral degree in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where he was a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. His dissertation studied the teaching practices of engineering instructors during game-based learning activities, and how these practices affected student motivation.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

« View session

For those interested in:

Advocacy and Policy
Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
engineering
Graduate