Premature Responsibility Among College Students During COVID-19: Survival, Academic Disruption, and Family Burden

This study explored how college students experienced premature responsibility during COVID-19, with particular attention to survival, academic disruption, and family burden. While existing research has widely documented online learning challenges, mental health strain, and educational inequality during the pandemic, less attention has been given to how these pressures converged to reshape students’ roles and responsibilities. Using a qualitative descriptive design and thematic analysis, this study analyzed textual responses from college student participants collected during the COVID-19 period. The findings indicate that students experienced the pandemic not only as an educational disruption but as a broader crisis that restructured their daily lives and social roles. Six themes emerged: survival as an early burden, academic disruption under material constraint, family burden and relational fear, emotional overload and disrupted rest, informational insecurity and the burden of rumor, and forced maturity and the reworking of studenthood. Together, these findings suggest that the pandemic accelerated the assumption of adult-like obligations and blurred the boundary between studenthood and adulthood. The study advances premature responsibility as a useful lens for understanding how crisis conditions reshape the lived realities of college students.