Student Success in College

There are at least two dimensions of student success that have been explored widely in numerous studies. One dimension is that student success in college is defined as students’ achieving their goals upon embarking on their college career. Completing academic degree programs such as bachelor’s degrees, graduate degrees, or professional degrees (e.g., M.D., J.D., and so on) satisfactorily is a common characterization of student success. But not all students define success as completing a degree. Some students, for example, attend college with the goal of determining whether or not a baccalaureate degree program will help them achieve their educational or career goals. Accordingly, they enroll in college-level courses to determine if their educational goals can be met by completing a degree. Some students are enrolled in multiple institutions simultaneously, or they transfer from one institution to another, commonly known as swirling, to achieve their goals for their college experience. Another dimension of student success that has been widely studied has to do with what colleges and universities can do to provide an environment and develop programs and support so that students can achieve their goals for their college experience. This can be a combination of crafting an institutional environment that values and supports student success through a wide variety of messages, programs, and policies that, taken in the aggregate, communicate that it highly values student success and will do everything possible to help students succeed. The terms “persistence” and “retention” often are used synonymously, but for the purpose of this discussion, persistence refers to what students can do to achieve success, while retention is what institutions can do to help students achieve their educational goals. Programs, experiences, strategies, and other initiatives included in this discussion do not necessarily stand alone. That is, often they are complementary and have an effect on each other. There is considerable overlap in the topics considered in this article and in the Oxford Bibliographies in Education article Student Engagement in Tertiary Education because student engagement often is considered as a means by which success in college is achieved. In identifying and describing sources that address student success in college, the approach taken in this article is to consider the topic from the perspective of what institutions can do to facilitate student success and what students can do to achieve their educational goals. Many of the studies cited in this bibliography may be replicated in the future, perhaps with different methodological designs and most certainly with other groups of students. This edition of the bibliography has been designed to update the previous iteration, but it also has two additional emphases. The previous bibliography nearly exclusively focused on four-year institutions to the exclusion of community colleges and other two-year institutions. That was an oversight. IPEDS data indicate that while 10,938,123 undergraduate students were enrolled in four-year institutions in 2020, 4,913,783 were enrolled in two-year institutions (National Center for Education Statistics, Report on the Condition of Education 2022 [Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2022]). The extent to which these students are successful in their educational endeavors is of great interest to higher education scholars, so many more citations are included related to students enrolled in two-year institutions than in the previous version. The other emphasis in this iteration is a natural progression in research on student success. In recent years researchers have taken a more nuanced view of programs and experiences designed to foster student success. For example, it has been widely asserted that first-year seminars provide an enriched experience for students leading to their persistence from year one to year two, and, accordingly, they have been part of the educational portfolio of many colleges and universities. Researchers, however, have parsed the focus of such seminars and have found that some first-year seminars have been more successful than others, depending on their focus. For example, those that are an extended form of orientation are not as potent as those that have an academic focus. Consequently, simply offering first-year seminars may not result in student success unless they have an academic focus. The same is true for a number of other experiences, meaning that simply having the experience available is not enough to enhance success. The results of studies related to the nuances of student experiences are reported with increasing frequency in the literature and a number of such studies are included in this bibliography.