The Impacts of COVID-19 on the Academic Performance of Graduate Students

Abstract

This research aimed to study the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the academic performance of graduate students during the first wave. Phone interviews were conducted with three York University graduate students. The findings highlight that the pandemic had unequal impacts on the academic performance of the interviewees depending on their family status. Furthermore, the data shows that the interviewees experienced increased academic and financial precarity and engaged in high levels of emotional labour for their families. The interviewee with caregiving responsibilities also participated in mental work and was constantly on the run to take care of her family. The research participants emphasized the importance of compassionate teaching, maintaining academic integrity, and the need for the university to increase graduate students’ financial security. In addition, the research participants exercised resilience using various coping strategies. Marxism informs data analysis to illustrate how the interviewees’ subjective experiences of academic, financial, and health inequality and precarity are linked to macro-level forces of neoliberal capitalist economic social organization and relations such as the commodification of higher education. Thus, the neoliberal university, whose primary objective is to produce surplus value, has led to the economic and academic exploitation of TAs, which has become more visible and exacerbated under COVID-19. In conclusion, the paper highlights the need for the dissemination of anti-capitalist knowledge to displace capitalist culture with its antithesis to build wider collective political actions in the pursuit of radical social transformation.