Educational debt is an economic stressor that is harmful to mental health and disproportionately experienced by African American and Latinx youth. In this paper, we use a daily diary design to explore the link between mental health, context specific factors like “college stress” and time use, and educational debt stress, or stress incurred from thinking about educational debt and college affordability. This paper utilizes data from a sample of predominately African American and Latinx college students who provided over 1000 unique time observations. Results show that debt-induced stress is predictive of greater self-reported hostility, guilt, sadness, fatigue, and general negative emotion. Moreover, the relationship may be partly mediated by “college stress” reflecting course loads and post-graduation job expectations. For enrolled students then, educational debt may influence mental health directly through concerns over affordability, or indirectly by shaping facets of college life. The window that our granular data provides into college experiences suggest that the consequences of student debt are manifest and immediate. Further, the documented day-to-day mental health burden for minority students may contribute to downstream processes such as matriculation.

教育债务是一种经济压力，对心理健康有害，非裔美国人和拉丁裔青年尤其经历过这种情况。在本文中，我们使用每日日记设计来探讨心理健康、“大学压力”和时间利用等特定背景因素以及教育债务压力或因考虑教育债务和大学负担能力而产生的压力之间的联系。本文使用的数据主要来自非裔美国人和拉丁裔大学生，他们提供了 1000 多个独特的时间观察结果。结果表明，债务引起的压力预示着更大的自我报告的敌意、内疚、悲伤、疲劳和一般的负面情绪。此外，这种关系可能部分受到反映课程负担和毕业后工作期望的“大学压力”的调节。对于在校学生来说，教育债务可能会通过对负担能力的担忧直接影响心理健康，或者通过影响大学生活的各个方面来间接影响心理健康。我们的详细数据为大学经历提供了一个窗口，表明学生债务的后果是显而易见且直接的。此外，记录在案的少数族裔学生的日常心理健康负担可能会影响入学等下游过程。