Defensive Coping During COVID-19 Undermined College Graduation, Four-Year Study Finds

When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered campuses in March 2020, college students everywhere were forced to improvise new ways of managing academic pressure under conditions none of them had chosen. For students with disabilities, the disruption was often compounded by the loss of accommodations, routines, and support services they depended upon. A new longitudinal study published in the journal Higher Education now offers one of the most detailed pictures yet of how that upheaval played out over time, tracking stress and coping among more than 1,300 students across four years and linking their psychological trajectories to whether they ultimately graduated. The results carry a sobering message: how students coped, not just how stressed they felt, appears to have shaped their odds of finishing college.

The research team, led by Simon Larose of Université Laval with colleagues from McGill University, the Université de Montréal, and Cégep de Saint-Laurent, followed a cohort of 1,348 students enrolled at ten colleges in Québec, Canada. Notably, 45 percent of the participants reported having a physical or psychological disability, a proportion high enough to allow meaningful comparisons between students with and without disabilities. The study’s design was unusually rigorous for pandemic-era research. Pre-pandemic academic adjustment and personal characteristics were measured in fall 2019, before anyone had heard of SARS-CoV-2, providing a genuine baseline. Stress and coping were then assessed at three points during the pandemic: spring 2020, spring 2021, and spring 2022. Finally, graduation data were drawn from official records in fall 2023, meaning the outcome measure did not rely on students’ self-reports.

Methodologically, the study employed a person-oriented approach rather than the variable-oriented analyses common in psychology. Instead of asking whether stress, on average, predicted graduation across the whole sample, the researchers used group-based trajectory modeling, a semiparametric technique developed by criminologist Daniel Nagin, to identify subgroups of students who followed similar developmental paths of stress and coping across the pandemic. This matters because averages can conceal divergent experiences: two students with identical mean stress levels might have followed entirely different courses, one climbing steadily and one spiking and recovering. By classifying students into trajectory groups, the team could ask which patterns of change were most common, which students ended up in which trajectories, and, crucially, whether trajectory membership predicted later graduation.

The first major finding concerned the shape of the pandemic’s psychological arc. Most students, the researchers found, experienced increasing stress between spring 2020 and spring 2021, followed by a subsequent decline after that point. This pattern tracks closely with the timeline of public health measures in Québec, where schools and colleges closed in March 2020, restrictions gradually eased from May 2021, and most sanitary measures were lifted by March 2022. The stress trajectory, in other words, mirrored the external constraints rather than simply fading with time. Meanwhile, the composition of students’ coping repertoires shifted in a more troubling direction. Over the same period, proactive coping strategies, the forward-looking efforts to anticipate problems and mobilize resources before crises hit, declined, whereas defensive coping strategies, the more reactive and avoidant responses aimed at managing distress after it arises, increased.

The second key finding concerned inequality in these trajectories. Students with disabilities were disproportionately represented in the trajectory groups characterized by high stress and high defensive coping, and they were underrepresented in the groups marked by high proactive coping. This is not merely a statistical curiosity. Prior research, including the team’s own earlier work on the first pandemic wave, had suggested that students with disabilities faced distinctive stressors during COVID-19, from disrupted access services to the cognitive and sensory demands of remote learning. The new analysis extends that picture across time, showing that the pandemic’s psychological burden was not evenly distributed even as conditions evolved. A student who entered college with a disability was more likely to ride the high-stress, defensively-coping current of the pandemic years, and less likely to be swimming with the proactive copers.

The third finding is the one with the sharpest practical edge. After controlling for pre-pandemic academic adjustment and other personal characteristics measured in fall 2019, membership in a high defensive coping trajectory was associated with lower odds of graduating by fall 2023, regardless of disability status. The wording of that last clause deserves emphasis. The link between defensive coping and non-graduation held for students with and without disabilities alike, suggesting that the mechanism is not specific to disability but rather reflects a general vulnerability conferred by a maladaptive coping style sustained across the crisis. In effect, students whose response to pandemic stress hardened into defensive patterns paid an academic price years later, even after the researchers statistically accounted for how well adjusted they had been before the pandemic began.

Why would defensive coping erode graduation odds? The authors’ framework, grounded in stress and coping theory, offers a plausible account. Proactive coping is resource-building: it involves planning, seeking support, and acting early to prevent stressors from escalating. Defensive coping, by contrast, is resource-draining: it manages immediate distress through avoidance, denial, or disengagement, which may provide short-term relief while allowing academic problems, missed deadlines, skipped courses, mounting incompletes, to accumulate silently. Over a multi-year program, that accumulation can become decisive. A student who repeatedly disengages from a difficult course in the moment may find themselves off-track for graduation long before the problem announces itself. The pandemic, by sustaining stress at elevated levels for two years, may have given defensive coping unusually fertile ground in which to take root and entrench.

The study’s implications for colleges and universities are relatively direct. If defensive coping trajectories predict dropout, then interventions that promote adaptive, proactive coping strategies could support academic persistence and reduce dropout risk among students with and without disabilities. The authors highlight the importance of such promotion explicitly in their conclusions. This aligns with a growing evidence base on student mental health interventions, including randomized trials of online mindfulness programs and peer support programs delivered during the pandemic, which have shown that psychological skills can be taught at scale. The present findings suggest such efforts should not be framed solely as mental health initiatives but as academic persistence initiatives, with graduation itself as an outcome worth targeting. They also suggest that students with disabilities warrant particular attention, given their overrepresentation in the high-risk trajectories, though the benefit of fostering proactive coping appears to extend to the entire student body.

Several caveats temper the conclusions. The cohort was drawn from Québec colleges, institutions with their own structural features, and graduation data came from that provincial system, so replication elsewhere is needed before generalizing broadly. Stress and coping were self-reported at annual intervals, which cannot capture week-to-week fluctuations or the mechanisms linking coping to academic outcomes. And while the statistical controls for pre-pandemic adjustment strengthen causal interpretation, they cannot fully rule out the possibility that unmeasured characteristics influence both coping trajectories and graduation. Still, the design’s strengths, a true pre-pandemic baseline, official graduation records, a large disability-inclusive sample, and trajectory methods that respect individual differences, make this one of the more credible longitudinal accounts of the pandemic’s academic toll. As institutions continue to absorb the aftershocks of COVID-19, the study’s core lesson stands out: the students most at risk of not graduating may be identifiable not by their stress levels alone, but by the defensive shape of their coping, and that shape, unlike a disability or a pandemic, is something colleges can help change.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal associations between stress and coping trajectories during COVID-19 and college graduation in students with and without disabilities

Article Title: College Graduation in Students with and without Disability: Links with Stress and Coping Trajectories during COVID-19

Article References: Larose, S., Beaulieu, C., Aziz, C., Bationo, N. J.-C., Bureau, J. S., Geoffroy, M.-C., Ghetti, A., & Côté, S. (2026). College Graduation in Students with and without Disability: Links with Stress and Coping Trajectories during COVID-19. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01783-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01783-2

Keywords: COVID-19, college graduation, stress, coping strategies, students with disabilities, higher education, longitudinal study, defensive coping, proactive coping, academic persistence, dropout risk, Québec colleges