The article discusses a study we conducted on the concept of success with mid- and senior-level executives in a federal government agency. Contrary to our expectation that the study’s participants define success in materialistic—money, positional power, and status symbols—terms, they used terms such as being connected, balance, and wholeness to define and describe success. Indeed, the participants linked the concept of success to spirituality and stated that to be successful one needs to embrace spirituality as well. The article defines spirituality, discusses the study, its findings and implications, and suggests that spirituality and the notion of success are associated. In addition, it proposes a conceptual model of success that contains four components of both success and spirituality.
While Tinto's student departure model has been tested and supported in numerous studies, it has not yet been applied to nontraditional students. This study attempted to find out whether Tinto's model, in particular the concepts of academic and social integration, can explain retention among nontraditional students. Attrition rates of 25 adult learner classes in a college of management and business were calculated. Four independent variables were entered into a regression equation in an attempt to explain attrition from these classes. They were: social, academic, and career integration; and the size of each class. The data showed that classes that were socially integrated and smaller were better able to retain their students than the less socially integrated and larger-sized classes. The data suggest that what keeps adult learners in educational programs is the social environment in which the learning takes place.
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