Higher education can be challenging for ethnic minority students due to a variety of factors: financial adversity, racism/discrimination, social exclusion, and pressure to assimilate. This symposium examines multiple distinct challenges that ethnic minority college students encounter by using longitudinal analyses and experimental methods across several studies to identify critical processes and underlying mechanisms for how minority students are impacted by a range of stressors at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Paper 1 examines how the level of financial distress experienced by Black and Latinx undergraduates predicts mental health outcomes via disruptions in sleep quality. Paper 2 tests the indirect role of school belonging in explaining how racial discrimination predicts the development of the imposter phenomenon over time. Paper 3 examines indirect pathways for how Black undergraduates cope with the "acting White" accusation and shape their racial/ethnic identity development. Paper 4 uses experimental methods to examine psychological and cognitive consequences when Black undergraduates face explicit pressure to racially code-switch in academic contexts. This collection of studies provides major implications for nuanced challenges and stressors commonly faced by ethnic minority students at PWIs. Policy recommendations, implications for higher education, and theoretical contributions will be further discussed.