College students in South Korea experience time pressure increasingly due to study, preparing for employment, and part-time job. People under high time pressure due to excessive workload were found to be tired and burnout. Burnout is usually defined as exhaustion, lethargy, dissatisfaction, pessimism, indifference, etc., which have become excessive due to excessive task or schoolwork. People have worked diligently, but they are in a state of skepticism and frustration rather than feeling what they expected or are rewarding. Individuals experience a high level of exhaustion, which increases mental and physical problems. In order to prevent high exhaustion of college students due to high time pressure, it is necessary to look for variables that mediate between these two variables. The purpose of this study was to investigate college life stress as a mediating variable between time pressure and burnout. The college life stress includes the relationships with the opposite sex, friendship, family relations, relationship with professors, academic problems, economic problem, future problems, value problems, and college life stress. In this study, college life stress was expected to play a mediating role between time pressure and burnout of college students. The research questions were set up as follows. First, are there any relations among time pressure, college life stress, and burnout of college students in South Korea? Second, are there mediation effects of college life stress on relations between time pressure and burnout?

The participants of this study were 395 college students in South Korea. In order to achieve it, 395 college students completed a set of questionnaires about time pressure, college life stress, and burnout. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS 23.0, and Cronbach’s α coefficient was extracted to verify the reliability of each scale. The data were then analyzed by correlation analysis and mediation analysis.

First, time pressure and college life stress were positively correlated with burnout of college students. And time pressure was positively correlated with burnout. Second, there was a partial mediation effect of college life stress between time pressure and burnout of college students. Such results imply that time pressure and college life stress are important for decreasing burnout of college students.

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