Exploring levels of mental health: a focus on financially disadvantaged students in the South African higher education system

In the South African higher education context, students funded by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme might be predisposed to greater challenges to their well-being, as they are recognised as an especially vulnerable social group. However, quantitative reporting of the levels of well-being experienced by this group of students is limited. In acknowledgement of this gap in understanding well-being in this group and towards the growing emergent literature on the well-being of higher education students more broadly, a study to explore the well-being of students from low-income households is warranted. Consequently, this article focuses on identifying the proportions of National Student Financial Aid Scheme-funded students who fall into three distinct well-being categories (flourishing, moderate mental health, and languishing) using data from a cross-sectional survey conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis also considers differences in well-being across gender, race, field of study, and institutional type. Participants included 6562 National Student Financial Aid Scheme students (males = 44.9%, mean age = 22.83, SD = 4.88). Findings indicated that 34.2% of students were flourishing, while the majority reported moderate mental health. Males, Black Africans, Education students and technical and vocational education and training college students had better overall mental health. The differences across demographic variables can be instructive to guide interventions tailored to support the groups that have lower proportions of flourishers. Future research could also build on such results using longitudinal or panel studies to determine whether the trends and levels of well-being will remain the same over time and the covariates of well-being in different subsamples of students within the South African higher education context.