Impacts of Covid-19 on University Students in Hungary

Abstract

This current paper examines the effects of restrictions with regard to the Covid-19 situation on Hungarian university students by means of an online questionnaire. The sudden closure of higher education institutions caught every actor of higher education, i.e., professors, students, and staff, off guard. Out of several questions, the authors focused on whether online connections had a protective role similar to actual personal connections against the negative consequences of anxiety and stress. Furthermore, they examined the factors in relation to the specialities of distance learning along with students’ attitudes and opinions thereon, and also the demographic characteristics influencing them. Analysing the solutions offered by universities, they searched for those non-university-specific strategic steps that could facilitate the sustainability of the educational system and the maintenance of students’ devotedness at least on a pre-pandemic level. Based on their results, they conclude that online relationships not only provide protection against stress and anxiety in the period of quarantine restrictions but directly secure the highest defence; hence, the authors introduced the concept of online personal relationship. Another important finding is that family can make up for the lack of personal meetings the most; therefore, the support of the family is more important than academic and technical help from universities, even for online studies. From the perspective of university support, the availability of course leaders has a vital role. The authors only achieved few significant results – this is however not a mistake but designates that the opinion of university students is highly alike in the examined questions.