More pain than gain: Effort–reward imbalance, burnout, and withdrawal intentions within a university student population.

Despite the widespread prevalence of psychological distress that affects many higher education students, existing student-stress research remains largely atheoretical. To address this gap, this paper applies Siegrist’s (1996) effort-reward imbalance model in a theoretical investigation of student stress. We surveyed Australian university students (N = 2,451) to identify whether discrepancies between efforts expended and rewards obtained...