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 the 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.

COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), was first found in Wuhan, China late in the December of 2019. Not long after that 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. One of these changes was the shift towards online learning.In this paper, we seek to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic and online learning impact college students' emotional wellbeing. To do this 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 learning modality (faceto-face, online synchronous, online asynchronous, etc.) is the main predictor of students' emotional wellbeing, followed by financial security. Factors such as satisfaction with their university's and government's handling of the pandemic are also important predictors.