Thriving in Community

In the previous two issues of "About Campus," the author has described the national study of college-student thriving that she has conducted with her doctoral students at Azusa Pacific University over the past several years. Their validated and reliable 35-item Thriving Quotient has been administered to over 15,000 college students across more than 70 institutions in the United States and Canada. The instrument was developed after exploring the positive psychology literature on human flourishing and the higher education literature on student success, then interviewing scores of students across multiple campuses. Their goal was to measure aspects of a college student's psychological functioning that were amenable to change, so that interventions could be designed to enable a higher percentage of students to get the most out of their college experience. Their research has demonstrated that college student thriving consists of five malleable factors: (1) a positive perspective of oneself and one's future; (2) engagement in the learning process; (3) investment of effort and self-regulation of one's learning behaviors; (4) healthy relationships and connections to others on campus; and (5) openness to diversity and the desire to make a contribution to the lives of others. They have labeled these five factors positive perspective, engaged learning, academic determination, social connectedness, and diverse citizenship. Together, these can explain up to an additional 20 percent of the variation in such student outcomes as GPA, intent to graduate, learning gains, learning satisfaction, and perception of institutional fit, over and above the contribution of students' demographic characteristics and features of the institution they attend. In the first two articles of this three-part series, the author outlined the positive perspective, engaged learning, and academic determination components of thriving in college. In this final article, she highlights the role that interpersonal relationships play, focusing on the social connectedness and diverse citizenship components of thriving.