Predictors of Burnout for Black, Brown, and Indigenous Doctoral Students

Taylor Payne, Rice University

The road to obtaining a doctoral degree can be long and arduous. Still, it is hopefully one that ends in reward. Historically, research on college students' well-being and mental health has focused on undergraduates, leaving graduate students' experiences under-researched. Research involving graduate students shows that graduate students often experience high levels of stress, negative affect, and reduced well-being throughout their program. Across all disciplines, there has been a trend of graduate programs reporting relatively high student attrition rates and an increase in doctoral students reporting mental health concerns. One factor related to the two issues graduate education is facing is burnout.

Many common causes for attrition from doctoral programs (i.e., inadequate supervision and socialization, financial strain, departmental culture) coincide with the issues many underrepresented ethnic minority doctoral students face (i.e., cultural isolation, having competence questioned, research devalued). Given what we know about the state of graduate education, the attrition problems, and the adverse experiences of ethnic minority students, we deemed it essential to understand factors that buffer or contribute to burnout for this population.

We used the job demands-resources model and Schaufeli et al.’s (2020) conceptualization of burnout to examine the extent to which advisor relationships, impostor feelings, and perfectionistic strivings are associated with each component of burnout (exhaustion, mental distance, emotional impairment, cognitive impairment). A path model was tested using the data from a nationwide sample of 247 ethnically minoritized doctoral students. Results indicated that a positive advisor-advisee relationship reduced burnout experiences across all domains of burnout, and those with higher levels of impostor feelings reported higher burnout scores. Perfectionistic strivings had a negative relationship with feelings of mental distance but a positive relationship with emotional impairment. There was a direct relationship between exhaustion and mental distance. Lastly, there is a significant indirect effect of impostor feelings on mental distance through exhaustion.

Everyone deserves an equitable academic experience. This work can contribute to higher education’s quest for educational equity and help retain talented students. The findings can inform organizational/departmental changes to highlight best advising practices, support faculty in effectively advising their students, or provide avenues for remediation. To help reduce impostor feelings, higher education can target programming to help students learn about the impostor phenomena and its impacts – to mitigate its impact. Lastly, universities and educational departments can help students maintain and set healthy work standards to combat the adverse effects of perfectionistic strivings. Burnout is a complex phenomenon that needs to be tackled at both the individual and organizational level simultaneously. No amount of rest will help if an individual has to return to a system that continually keeps burning them. 

Schaufeli, W. B., Desart, S., & De Witte, H. (2020). Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT)—Development, Validity, and Reliability. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(24), 9495. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249495