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Given the social and emotional tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic on college and university students, many students have become academically disengaged during the pandemic. Although some colleges and universities have the capacity to promote social support for their students, research has yet to comprehensively demonstrate the relationship between social support and academic engagement. To fill this gap, we leverage survey results from four universities across the United States and Israel. Through multi-group structural equation modelling, we explore (a) how perceived social support relates to being emotionally unavailable for learning, (b) how this relationship is partially explained through coping and COVID-19 concerns, and (c) how these relationships can differ across countries. We find that students who perceived higher levels of social support had lower rates of being emotionally unavailable for learning. Part of this relationship occurred through greater rates of coping and, subsequently, fewer concerns about the pandemic. We also noticed significant differences in these relationships between countries. We conclude with a discussion of study implications for higher education policies and practices.

Objective: This study explored risk and resilience factors of mental health functioning during the coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) pandemic. Methods: A sample of 467 adults (M age = 33.14, 63.6% female) reported on mental health (depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD], and somatic symptoms), demands and impacts of COVID‐19, resources (e.g., social support, health care access), demographics, and psychosocial resilience factors. Results: Depression, anxiety, and PTSD rates were 44%, 36%, and 23%, respectively. Supervised machine learning models identified psychosocial factors as the primary significant predictors across outcomes. Greater trauma coping self‐efficacy and forward‐focused coping, but not trauma‐focused coping, were associated with better mental health. When accounting for psychosocial resilience factors, few external resources and demographic variables emerged as significant predictors. Conclusion: With ongoing stressors and traumas, employing coping strategies that emphasize distraction over trauma processing may be warranted. Clinical and community outreach efforts should target trauma coping self‐efficacy to bolster resilience during a pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]