  COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), first
emerged in Wuhan, China late in December 2019. Not long after, 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,
including an educational shift towards online learning. In this paper, we seek
to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic and increase in online learning impact
college students' emotional wellbeing. 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 features related to
students' academic life have the largest impact on their emotional wellbeing.
Other important factors include students' satisfaction with their university's
and government's handling of the pandemic as well as students' financial
security.
