Perceived Academic Stress and Quality of Campus Life in Business Schools

N Akbar Jan
Assistant Professor, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Department of Human Resource Management and Soft Skills, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India; and is the corresponding author. E-mail: akbarjan.1975@gmail.com; akbarjan75@ibsindia.org

Asha Binu Raj
Assistant Professor, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Department of Human Resource Management and Soft Skills, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: asha.raj.abc@gmail.com; asha@ibsindia.org

A K Subramani
Associate Professor and Head, Department of Management Studies, St. Peter's College of Engineering and Technology, Avadi, Chennai 600054, Tamil Nadu, India. E-mail: aksubramani@gmail.com; draksubramani@gmail.com

Ashok Kumar Goute
Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Department of Human Resource Management and Soft Skills, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: ashok.kumar@ibsindia.org

The main objective of this paper is to explore the impact of students' perceived academic stress on the quality of campus life of business schools in South India. A survey was conducted among the first and final-year MBA students from Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad business schools. Structured questionnaires designed through Google Forms were used to gather the primary data from a sample of 386 students. A cross-sectional study examined the significant academic stressors and how students perceive and manage these stressors. In addition, this paper also analyzes the impact of academic stress on the quality of campus life by examining the physical health, environmental health, mental health, and social relationships among students. Data was collected thrice in a semester, i.e., during the beginning of the semester, mid-semester, and end of the semester during examinations. The research outcome shows that all the academic stress factors identified in the study (stress perception, stressors, and stress management) significantly relate to the academic stress construct. Similarly, physical, environmental, and mental health and social relationship are positively associated with the quality of campus life. The results of the SEM also portray that the academic stress prevailing in the business schools results in negative perceptions towards the quality of campus life among the student community.

Introduction

personal and professional lives (Adomah et al., 2017). Academic stress refers to education-related stress. It is the primary source of stress among young people. Most of the time, a few students perceive extraordinary academic burdens that affect their academic achievements (Busari, 2012). However, students of school education and higher education perceive academic stress due to the heavy syllabus, frequent examinations/tests/assessments, and completion of assignments/projects on time (Ammar et al., 2013; Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015; Chandra, 2021; and Hosseinkhani et al., 2021). The students may find it challenging to cope with the pace of the syllabus completion at par with the speed of the faculty or competition with other students, which results in academic stress. In higher education, academic stress exists in all fields like engineering, management, law, medical, pharmacy education, etc. However, the level and nature of stress may vary from one field to another (Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015; Icaro et al., 2018; Khan, 2018; Deemah et al., 2020; Michaela et al., 2020; Clabaugh et al., 2021; and Hosseinkhani et al., 2021). The quality of campus life plays a critical role in students' lives in managing their academic stress, enhancing and sustaining their physical health, mental health, environmental health, and better social relationships. The quality of campus life also improves the academic performance of the students and holistic development in related areas (Schermerhorn et al., 2005; and Lujain et al., 2018). The present paper attempts to explore the perceived academic stress and campus life quality among postgraduate students in business schools in South India.

Stress
According to Klarreich (1988), the term 'stress' is defined as "a situation in which an employee is challenged with a job opportunity, contraint or demand linked to what the employee needs, and where the expected result is significant and not certain". In other words, "it is the state of tension experienced by individuals facing extraordinary demands, constraints, or opportunities". This concept applies to every individual, including students in the academic context (Jassal, 2021; and Manuel et al., 2021).

Types of Stress
In general, there are two types of stress: eustress and distress. Eustress is positive stress, which does not damage the body, and it is needed to promote the physical growth of an individual. It is a moderate level of stress which stimulates a person to accomplish better performance based on his/her potential, and which may vary from individual to individual. Distress is negative stress which affects the human body and causes serious ailments or discomforts. It may lead to inadequate performance, resulting in dissatisfaction of job, unethical behavior, accidents, ill health, loss of employment, absenteeism, etc.

Stressors
'Stressors' refer to the factors which result in stress of the individual. In the present research context, the students of business schools may have both eustress and distress (Adomah et al., 2017). The eustress stressors may be increasing academic performance and getting employability in the reputed organizations. In contrast, distress stressors are due to lack of infrastructure, lack of qualified faculty, lack of appropriate study material, lack of supportive learning climate, addiction to bad habits, family issues, financial issues, etc.

Stress Management Strategies
In general, individuals can manage both eustress and distress by themselves or with the help of mentors, counselors, psychologists, physicians, etc. (Ammar et al., 2013). There are a variety of stress management techniques that the students can adopt to minimize or eliminate the effect of academic stress, which are given below:

• Time management: Proper planning and schedule to perform academic activities and strict adherence to the plan;
• Yoga and Meditation: Performing yoga and meditation daily or at least twice or thrice a week;
• Hobbies and Recreational activities: Students can engage themselves in exciting hobbies and recreational activities;
• Social Relationships: Sharing stress with friends/family members; and
• Mentoring/Counseling: Approaching mentors/counselors in educational institutions to reduce stress.

Quality of Campus Life
'Quality of Campus life' refers to a healthy teaching-learning environment that improves physical health, mental and environmental health, and social relationships in an educational institution. These three essential components of campus life enhance the students' academic performance, skill development, and employability. They also contribute to the holistic development of students during the program (Ammar et al., 2013; and Leong et al., 2021). Physical health can be defined "as the normal functioning of the body at all levels". It has a significant influence on the overall wellbeing of the individual. Therefore, it is one of the critical dimensions of the overall health of the people. Mental health refers to "cognitive, behavioral, and emotional wellbeing". It denotes how positively a person thinks, feels, and behaves. Environmental health refers to an individual's ability to exercise and perform daily activities which are observable. Human beings are social animals. Maintaining a good relation with friends, family members and teachers can be a good stress-buster for students that can prevent stress and minimize or eliminate the effect of academic stress in an educational institution.

Literature Review
Mustafa and Sarfaraz (2021) analyzed the students' perception of stress at Oman University. This stress was due to the effect of Covid-19-induced e-learning. The study indicates that 82.5% of students perceived moderate stress levels, and 14.4% perceived high stress levels. The findings further show a significant negative relationship between students' academic performance and perceived stress. It is observed that sustained stress over a long period of time could decrease academic performance and physical and mental health. Hosseinkhani et al. (2021) assessed academic stress and discovered its sources at individual and school levels among school-going adolescents in Iran. Various factors such as type of school, parents' education, economic and family status, gender, and educational period were closely connected to academic stress. The study indicated that Iranian adolescents witnessed moderate levels of stress, where academic stress was linked with several individual and school-level variables. Based on the research outcome, they have suggested that family members, students, and teachers must educate themselves on stress prevention techniques and coping mechanisms.

Navneet et al. (2021) scrutinized the factors inducing stress and stressors among undergraduate and postgraduate business school students. Their study considered various parameters such as university exams, attendance, assessments, the expectation of the parent, and final placement to analyze the students' academic stress. The study's outcome underlined that about 20% of the variance explained in stress is found through social stress, whereas 18% academic stress among the students was contributed by university exam, 16% by internal exam, and job-related stress accounted for 14.2% respectively. The paper also stated that social factors play a vital role in causing stress among students. Hence, it is suggested that the B-schools should pay attention to design policies for social support. Yamini (2020) investigated the perception of academic stress witnessed by students during current online education and coping strategies. The result of the research specified that significant differences were detected among the fear of academic failure, online and home environment between female and male students. Furthermore, many respondents stated that they started to divert their attention towards various creative events and joined specific courses that helped them acquire new technical skills.

In their paper, Michaela et al. (2020) evaluated the impact of stress on secondary and higher education students. It is found from the previous study that academic achievement can decrease among students due to academic-related stress, which reduces the academic interest among the students and increases the risk of school dropouts. This narrative review represents the influence of academic-related stress on students' learning capacity and academic performance, mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and substance use. Icaro et al. (2018) analyzed university students' lives regarding stress and quality of life. The result of the research shows that there is a negative association between student stress level and quality of life. Khan (2018), in his study, discovered the influence of academic stress on the performance of students and its effect on demographic variables like education level, gender, and age. The results showed that stress has a substantial impact on students' performance. Also, perceived stress showed significant variance among the senior and junior students. Scores also showed a non-significant difference when the stress was evaluated at the beginning and end of the semester. Their study also revealed that academic performance was better among young students than the older ones.

Adomah et al. (2017) investigated the association between stress and quality of life of undergraduate pharmacy students. From the analysis, it is found that there are significant correlations among stress and various domains concerning the quality of life for undergraduate pharmacy students. Lujain et al. (2018) examined the perceived stress level and quality of life among D.Pharm students. They found that stress has played a significant role in the life of the students and displayed that almost 51% of respondents often witnessed negative symptoms of depression, unease, blue mood, and despair. The study also showed that male students had perceived lower levels of stress than female students. They also found that there was no relationship between stress and year of study.

Mojgan (2016) identified students' academic stress under different categories such as education, demographic profile, health status, and students' behavior. The study found a relationship between the students' health status, gender, physical activity, and perceived stress. Moreover, the analysis also found that female students had higher stress levels due to poor health status and lack of physical activity. Sue and Aziz (2015) used cross-sectional analysis to determine the key predictors and causes of stress among Malaysian public university students. The study indicated that the students did not reveal expressively higher stress levels than the overall population, even though their perceived stress levels increased considerably.

Based on the review of literature related to academic stress, the present paper aims to analyze the academic stressors, levels of stress experienced by students and the quality of their campus life, which depends on physical, mental and environmental health and social relationships. Furthermore, the paper also intends to empirically analyze the relationship between academic stress and students' quality of campus life. The following hypothesis is formulated for the research:

H1: Academic stress negatively affects the quality of campus life of business school students.

Figure 1 shows the conceptual model of the present research study, which explores the cause and effect relationship between academic stress and students' perception of the quality of campus life.

Data and Methodology
The Quality of Life (QoL) questionnaire of WHO (WHOQoL-BREF, 2012) with 26 items was adopted in this research. The first two questions were used to evaluate the overall QOL and health status of the respondents. The next 24 questions measure the following

four factors of QoL: physical health (7 items), mental health (6 items), social relationships (3 items), and environmental health (8 items).

We have adopted a cross-sectional study to examine the significant academic stressors among students and how they perceive and manage these stressors. The data was collected from the respondents three times in a semester (i.e., at the beginning of the semester, mid-semester, and at the end of the semester). Two different constructs were used to measure academic stress and the quality of campus life. The academic stress construct comprises three subsections: stress perception, stressors, and stress management strategies. The second construct, i.e., quality of campus life, has four subsections: physical health, environmental health, mental health, and social relationship. The research instrument was verified and validated through the pilot study with 40 respondents. The Cronbach's alpha of the pilot study was more than 0.70 for all the dimensions of both factors, i.e., academic stress and quality of campus life, which shows that the data collection instrument of the research was reliable. The sample size of the survey was 386, comprising of students from 15 different business schools.

The present study was conducted for a period of six months (from January 2021 to June 2021) to explore the main stress factors faced by MBA students of first and final years from around 15 business schools across three major cities, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. We used a structured questionnaire designed through Google Forms to gather the primary data from the targeted student community. The questionnaire link was sent through e-mail and WhatsApp. The data collected through Google Forms was coded and analyzed using IBM SPSS for Windows, Version 20.0.

Results
Demographic Profile
Table 1 shows the profile of the sampled respondents.

From Table 1, it is evident that a significant proportion (54.1%) of the students are from the final year MBA program, and the remaining (45.9%) are from the first year. The average age of the sampled students ranges between 20 and 26. Compared to male students (46.6%), the representation of female (53.4%) students was more.

Descriptive Analysis
This section deals with the results of descriptive statistical analysis and the Structural Equation Modeling approach of the conceptual model.

Table 2 shows the means and standard deviations of the perception of academic stress identified through 10 items. The MBA students have exhibited comparatively lower stress levels at the beginning of the semester. However, they have perceived relatively high levels of stress during the mid and at the end of the semester. In general, the academic programs would have slightly lesser academic activities such as tests, assignments, projects, assessments at the beginning of the academic session and gradually increase in the mid-semester. It may be at its peak during the end-semester. Therefore, teaching faculty in the MBA program should ensure a uniform load of academic activities well-planned to avoid more intense educational activities at the end of the semester. The critical factor that creates stress to the students, i.e., 'poor interest in some subjects', is that the teaching faculty should devote additional time and care to the poor performers to understand their problems and resolve the issue with proper guidance. From the students' perspective, adequate preparation for the internal assessments periodically could prevent the fear of the examinations.

Table 3 summarizes the academic stressors perceived by the students. The academic stressor scale comprises 30 items, including the factors related to the teaching faculty, curriculum, teaching-learning process, teaching environment, assessment system, etc. For example, the students perceive a high level of stress due to 'Teachers are too demanding in academics' (4.358), 'Inadequate lab and library facilities' (4.206), 'Difficulty in remembering all that is studied' (4.089), and 'Examination syllabus is too heavy in some subjects' (4.083). In addition, the students perceive more stress due to examination syllabus, lack of quality study materials, eleventh-hour preparation, more demands by the teaching faculty, etc.

Table 4 presents the mean and standard deviation of various stress management strategies adopted by the respondents. The students adopt positive and negative stress busters to manage their stress levels. However, the negative stress management strategies such as smoking or consumption of alcohol, taking drugs, conflict with friends/ teachers/ college authorities, etc., may increase their stress levels further and end up in chaos. But most of the students try to adopt positive stress management strategies like doing yoga and meditation, taking guidance from mentors/counselors on campus, reading self-motivation books, sharing stressful situations with friends/family members, etc.

Table 5 indicates the academic stress level of students during the beginning, mid, and end of the semester based on their year of study. From Table 5, it is found that the final year students perceive a high level of stress compared to the first year students studying in postgraduate programs because the final year students need to complete all their backlogs, improve the CGPA, submit a project report, and get placement in good company. Therefore, by creating awareness among students and educating them, both first and final year of MBA courses, the teaching faculty can maintain manageable positive stress. This can be done by planning and following a strict preparation schedule for the exam and campus placement.

Table 6 tabulates the results of academic stress of the students based on their gender. Again, it is seen that compared to male students, female students perceive comparatively high levels of stress.

Table 7 presents the mean and standard deviation of the students' perception of stress and quality of campus life based on the responses at the end of the semester. The table shows that female students have perceived high levels of academic stressors and stress

levels compared to male students. However, they do not adopt effective stress management strategies to relieve the stress, which results in lack of physical and mental health. On the other hand, the MBA students studying in the first year have perceived high academic stressors and stress levels. Though they do not use individual and social stress management strategies to revive themselves from high-stress levels, they can better manage their social relationship than final year students.

Structural Equation Modeling Approach
Figure 2 shows that all the academic stress factors (i.e. perception of stress level, stressors, and stress management) have noteworthy factor loading (more than 0.40) on the academic stress construct. Among these factors, stress management has a negative effect on academic stress, which means appropriate positive stress management practices can minimize or eliminate academic stress in business schools.

Similarly, the quality of campus life construct has significant factor loading from all its physical health, mental health, environmental health, and social relationship factors. However, all these relationships are positive and significant at 1% level of significance. Further, it is also seen that academic stress has a substantial adverse effect on the students' perception of the quality of campus life in business schools at 1% significance level.

Table 8 summarizes the regression weights of the research model. The outcome of the SEM model fitness is revealed in Table 9, which specifies that the values of the indices are at a satisfactory level; subsequently, it is concluded that the research model of the present study is fit.

Discussion
The results show that the level of stress significantly varies at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester because their academic work to maintain their consistency in academic performance is not the same during the different points of time in the semester. The study's outcome is also evident that students perceive academic stress irrespective of their gender and year of study. MBA students have perceived a comparatively high level of academic stressors at the end of the semester. Sampled MBA students have responded that they adopt positive and negative stress busters to relieve their academic stress. The results also indicate that first-year students have perceived a comparatively high level of academic stress than final year students. Similarly, female students have demonstrated a high level of stress than male students. Further, the results of SEM denote that the students' academic stress has a negative effect on various dimensions of quality of campus life, namely, physical, mental, environmental health, and social relationship.

Conclusion
The results of the SEM portray that the academic stress prevailing in the business schools results in a negative perception towards the quality of campus life among the student community. Therefore, creating a positive stress climate in the educational institutions will minimize the negative stress and its impact on the quality of campus life. Hence, students can have a happy teaching-learning environment in the institutions, which increases their academic performance and skill development. Necessary support by teachers and other academic and non-academic staff in the institution will help them manage stress. Also, social relationships and parents play a significant role in managing stress among students. Thus, it is essential to implement individual and institutional stress management strategies to reduce stress levels and improve the quality of campus life. Restructuring the curricula and pedagogy may also be an efficient way to reduce the students' extremely high levels of academic stress.

Implications: This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the impact of business school students' perception of academic stress on their quality of campus life in business schools. It also further explores the influence of demographic variables on the students' perception of academic stress in business schools. Additionally, this study would help the academicians and policy makers of business schools manage the academic stress of the students' by implementing various stress management strategies and helping them manage their stress at a reasonable level.

Limitation and Future Scope: The present study was conducted among postgraduate students from the management stream (MBA) from business schools. However, a similar model can be tested at the undergraduate level or at the school level of education in private and government institutions. Therefore, a comparative study can be done in the future.

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