Resilience is of utmost importance for first-year undergraduate students to persist and flourish throughout the course of their studies. The researchers explored the comparative and simultaneous effect of two factors, i.e., emotional intelligence (EI) and critical thinking (CT) disposition in predicting the resilience of first-year undergraduate…

First-year seminars (FYS) comprise one of 11 researched interventions in postsecondary education known as High-Impact Practices, but few rigorous studies report significantly high impacts. This study examined a FYS employing propensity score matching to link cases and controls in a quasi-experimental design. One semester later cumulative grade…

While mindfulness intervention research is prevalent, it is limited in (1) relation to college students' grade point average (GPA) and retention and (2) minimum dosage recommended for the intervention. This repeated-measures quasi-experimental nonequivalent control groups study investigated differences in mindfulness, stress, flourishing, GPA, and…

Given the importance of academic motivation for student retention and persistence and that most undergraduate students participate in paid employment, this study investigated first-year undergraduate student employment and its relationship with academic motivation. Specifically, this study used the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education…

Research has demonstrated consistently that personality and perceived stress, independently, are essential factors for university adjustment among university freshmen; however, little is known about the associations between personality, perceived stress, and adjustment together. Our primary goal was to explore the predictive utility of perceived…

Student retention has not changed in almost 40 years despite the plethora of attention. Maybe it is time to look at it differently. The study examines the relationships of parental education level, educational aspirations, and engagement. The National Survey of Student Engagement data were used in the analyses, but it raised questions about the…

Non-parent mentoring relationships are important protective factors for first-generation college students. Previous research has focused on singular mentoring relationships measured at one time point, failing to capture the breadth and dynamic nature of social networks. The current study is a longitudinal investigation of first-generation…

In the current study, we examine the novel hypothesis that perceived stress is a mechanism through which the relationship between attachment orientations and university adjustment can be explained. Present study explored both attachment orientations and perceived stress regarding adjustment; and perceived stress as mediator for the relationship…

Psychological capital (PsyCap) is uniquely positioned at the intersection between student and academic institution. College administrators should look to psychological capital, beyond just student performance, for retention efforts in the financial management of the institution. The psychological capital and retention of four cohorts of freshmen…

With limited budgets and increasing enrollment demands, colleges need fast, free, and practical solutions supporting academic success and retention. The Academic Reality Check (ARC) tool helps to predict traditional freshmen awareness of their own academic expectations in college quickly, supporting the financial investment being made by all…

Recent world events and the ever-changing nature of higher education mean that colleges and universities exist in a state of near-constant flux. This qualitative study explored the experiences of seven college seniors who persisted to graduation after beginning their college careers when their university was admitting lower-division students for…

This study examined whether first-time full-time freshman students' sense of purpose predicted their progress towards a degree. Freshman students (N = 421, 62.2% females) completed self-report measures of sense of purpose and academic commitments within the first month of starting college; a year later, the data on first-year progress towards a…

This study evaluates the impact of the peer-mentoring program implemented by a Chilean higher education institution on underrepresented students' academic success. Specifically, it assesses whether freshmen who enrolled in 2018 and took part in this initiative performed better than students with similar characteristics who did not. A quantitative…

The Kalamazoo Promise (KPromise) is amongst the most well-known and generous tuition-free policies. This study advances the understanding of Promise student performance and persistence. We used a weighted-least square means and variance adjusted (WLSMV) SEM approach and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) to deal with missing data. The main model suggested…

This longitudinal study examines (a) whether perceptions of ethnic discrimination during the first weeks of college predicted later school belonging among first-year college students of color (N = 638) attending a predominantly White institution (PWI), (b) whether school belonging, in turn, predicted retention to the second year, and (c) whether…