Impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Life of Higher Education Students: Global Survey Dataset from the First Wave

The Covid-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has completely reshaped the lives of people around the world, including higher education students. Beyond serious health consequences for a proportion of those directly affected by the virus, the pandemic holds important implications for the life and work of higher education students, considerably affecting their physical and mental well-being. To capture how students perceived the first wave of the pandemic's impact, one of the most comprehensive and large-scale online surveys across the world was conducted. Carried out between 5 May 2020 and 15 June 2020, the survey came at a time when most countries were experiencing the arduous lockdown restrictions. The online questionnaire was prepared in seven different languages (English, Italian, North Macedonian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish) and covered various aspects of higher education students’ life, including socio-demographic and academic characteristics, academic life, infrastructure and skills for studying from home, social life, emotional life and life circumstances. Using the convenience sampling method, the online questionnaire was distributed to higher education students aged 18 and over and enrolled in a higher education institution. The final dataset consisted of 31,212 responses from 133 countries and 6 continents. The relationships between selected socio-demographic characteristics and elements of student life were tested by using a chi-squared test. The data may prove useful for researchers studying the pandemic's impacts on various aspects of student life. Policymakers can utilize the data to determine the best solutions as they formulate policy recommendations and strategies to support students during this and any future pandemic.


a b s t r a c t
The Covid-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has completely reshaped the lives of people around the world, including higher education students. Beyond serious health consequences for a proportion of those directly affected by the virus, the pandemic holds important implications for the life and work of higher education students, considerably affecting their physical and mental wellbeing. To capture how students perceived the first wave of the pandemic's impact, one of the most comprehensive and large-scale online surveys across the world was conducted. Carried out between 5 May 2020 and 15 June 2020, the survey came at a time when most countries were experiencing the arduous lockdown restrictions. The online questionnaire was prepared in seven different languages (English, Italian, North Macedonian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish) and covered various aspects of higher education students' life, including socio-demographic and academic characteristics, academic life, infrastructure and skills for studying from home, social life, emotional life and life circumstances. Using the convenience sampling method, the online questionnaire was distributed to higher education students aged 18 and over and enrolled in a higher education institution. The final dataset consisted of 31,212 responses from 133 coun-tries and 6 continents. The relationships between selected socio-demographic characteristics and elements of student life were tested by using a chi-squared test. The data may prove useful for researchers studying the pandemic's impacts on various aspects of student life. Policymakers can utilize the data to determine the best solutions as they formulate policy recommendations and strategies to support students during this and any future pandemic.
© Value of the Data • The global dataset for the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic provides direct and valuable information on the pandemic's impacts on higher education students in various aspects of their lives. • The dataset provides the most comprehensive data for a sample of 31,212 students across 133 countries and 6 continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, South America), allowing geographical comparative examinations. • The dataset covers various aspects of student life (socio-demographic and academic characteristics, academic life, infrastructure and skills for studying from home, social life, emotional life and life circumstances) and thus provides a rich environment for researchers to examine the interactions of various aspects of student life. • The dataset involves considerable information for education stakeholders and policymakers to identify the best solutions as they formulate policy recommendations and strategies to support students during this and any future pandemic. • The dataset could be extended by collecting data during future possible waves of the Covid-19 pandemic using the same questionnaire or a questionnaire adjusted to the post-pandemic era, thereby allowing a longitudinal examination.
• The dataset may be (re)used for further in-depth examinations and as a benchmark for comparing similar data involving the Covid-19 pandemic's implications for student life.

Data Description
The Covid-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has created an unprecedented challenge with drastic consequences for all national systems, including higher education, which had no benchmark or previous experience available [1][2][3] . The health crisis supposedly emerged in China during December 2019 and its sudden outbreak saw it begin to spread rapidly across the world. The situation became so serious that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 [4 , 5] . Beyond serious health consequences for a proportion of those directly affected by the virus, the pandemic holds important implications for the life and work of higher education students, considerably affecting their physical and mental well-being [6] . Namely, to curb the spread of Covid-19, educational institutions across the world transferred various courses from onsite to online with a rapid pace [7 , 8] , with online learning (e-learning) thereby becoming a mandatory teaching and learning process of higher education institutions [1] . Many higher education institutions were even encountering e-learning for the first time, making the transition especially demanding for them because almost no time was available to organize and adapt to the new landscape of education [2] . Accordingly, this has created many challenges for both teacher and students.
The global dataset contains raw data on how higher education students perceive the impacts of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on various aspects of their lives on a global level [1] . Data were collected as part of the CovidSocLab [6] project, which served as a working platform for international collaboration and implementation of the Global Student Survey. The project aimed to provide the latest and comprehensive findings in selected research areas in the social sciences. To capture the students' perceptions on the Covid-19 pandemic's impact, the Faculty of Public Administration at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, cooperating with an international consortium of universities, other higher education institutions and students' associations, launched one of the most comprehensive and large-scale online surveys across the world entitled "Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Life of Higher Education Students" [6] .
The online questionnaire targeted higher education students with respect to what life was like for them during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It comprised 39 mainly closedended questions divided into seven sections, namely socio-demographic and academic characteristics, academic life, infrastructure and skills for studying from home, social life, emotional life, life circumstances as well as personal reflections on Covid-19 [1] . At the end, there was an option for the respondents to give their e-mail address in case they would like to be notified about the survey results [9 , 10] .
Certain answer choices ("other" and "not applicable"), open-ended questions (the question on personal reflections on Covid-19) and questions raising anonymity issues (the question on a student's e-mail address) are excluded from the dataset. Hence, it covers a total of 160 items from across various aspects of student life. Detailed information on the measured aspects of student life during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is presented in Table 1 . Data are provided in the form of Excel (in .xlsx and .csv formats) and SPSS (in .sav format) files, with rows representing cases and columns designating variables. Specific information for each variable, i.e., name, label, values, remarks, is provided in the codebook (view the Excel file in the .xlsx format or SPSS file in .sav format), while empty cells are considered to be missing values.
The final sample consists of 31,212 respondents who shared their perceptions of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic's impact. The response rate was 33.1% since 94,246 respondents actually opened the link to the online questionnaire. The participation was unequally distributed throughout the 133 countries from the 6 continents [1] . With 308 responses not providing the information on the country, the participation distribution was the following (see Aristovnik et al. [1] ): (1) more than 10 0 0 responses were collected in 10 countries (Poland, Italy, Mexico, Chile, Turkey, India, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Portugal, Slovenia); (2) between 500 and 1000 responses  were collected in 7 countries (Romania, Croatia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, Hungary, Ghana); (3) between 200 and 500 responses were collected in 19 countries; (4) a total of 2911 responses were collected in 41 countries having between 10 and 200 responses; and (5) a total of 130 respondents were collected in 56 countries with fewer than 10 responses; however, these respondents are censored to ensure anonymity. Detailed information on the survey respondents' main socio-demographic characteristics is presented in Table 2 , whereby missing values are excluded from the calculations. The respondents ranged in age from 18 to 70 years with a mean age of 23.6 years and standard deviation of 5.6 years, with most being female (65.4%). Most respondents were full-time (87.8%) and first-level (80.1%) students. They were mostly studying in the field of the social sciences (37.0%) [1 , 9] .
The content of the dataset can be divided into 10 different aspects of student life (see Aristovnik et al. [1] ). Due to the specificity or complexity of items, two aspects (change in habits and personal reflections) were excluded from further consideration. The remaining 8 aspects (from onsite to online lectures, academic work, academic life, social life, emotional life, personal circumstances, role of institutions, measures of institutions) were considered in calculations. Besides some exceptions (view the codebook in the Excel file in the xlsx format or the SPSS file in .sav format), the perceptions (i.e., satisfaction, agreement, importance, or frequency) of individual aspects of student life were primarily assessed using a Likert scale, containing 5 response options with 1 representing the lowest value and 5 the highest value [1 , 11] . Tables 3 and 4 show the shares of students who selected the top two response options for each item for selected aspects. The shares are presented for the whole sample (general) and by different socio-demographic groups. Moreover, the relationships between selected sociodemographic characteristics and elements of student life were tested using a chi-squared test and considering statistical significance at the 0.05 level. The computed p-values were adjusted using a Bonferroni correction by considering all items covered in the dataset [12] .

Experimental Design, Materials and Methods
The online questionnaire was grounded on the European Students' Union Survey [13] and extended with selected elements that facilitated detailed understanding of additional personal and financial circumstances as well as the perception of support measures and behaviour changes during the Covid-19 pandemic's first wave [1] . The questionnaire was initially designed in English and subsequently, with the help of native speakers who are also fluent in English, translated into six other languages, i.e., Italian, North Macedonian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Turkish [9] .
The survey targeted all higher education students. With the aim of reaching a wide range of students, a non-probabilistic sampling technique, specifically convenience sampling, was utilized [14] . This process was facilitated by promoting the online questionnaire on various university communication systems around the world as well as on social media [1] . Detailed information about the survey was available to the students before they gave their informed consent and thereby confirmed their participation in the survey. The data collection was conducted via the open-source web application 1KA (One Click Survey; www.1ka.si ). Carried out between 5 May 2020 and 15 June 2020, the data collection came at a time when most countries were experiencing the arduous lockdown restrictions. The data preparation, aggregation, cleaning process, and calculations were performed in the Python programming language utilizing the Pandas and Numpy libraries [15] . Table 3 The relationships between socio-demographic characteristics (gender and status) and elements of student life.

Table 4
The relationships between socio-demographic characteristics (level of study and field of study) and elements of student life.
Level of study Field of study

Ethics Statements
All participants were informed about the survey, including its details, and provided their informed consent before participating. Participants agreed to participate in the survey by clicking on a "next page" button, as was explicitly stated on the initial page of the online questionnaire. Participation in the survey was anonymous and voluntary, implying participants could withdraw from the survey without any consequences. Given the data-protection rules, the survey was available to participants being at least 18 years old and enrolled in a higher education institution. The procedures of this survey comply with the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki regarding research on human participants. Ethical Committees of several of the higher education institutions involved approved this study, such as the University of Verona (protocol number: 152951), ISPA -Instituto Universitário (Ethical Clearance Number: I/035/05/2020), University of Arkansas (IRB protocol number: 2005267431), Walter Sisulu University (Ethical Clearance Number: REC/ST01/2020) and Fiji National University (CHREC ID: 252.20).

Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.