Student Involvement and the Impact on Academic Success

Abstract

Your kindness, grace, and support was priceless throughout the process. Thank you to my committee, Lindsey, Keith, Carl, and Hannah for your inquisitive questions, valuable lessons, allowing me to bounce ideas off you, and challenging me to grow as a researcher and a scholar. Thank you to my Mom, Dad, Aunts, and Uncle, brothers, and sister who encouraged me and checked in on me throughout the past few years as I began this journey. Thank you to the Honors College staff, for allowing the flexibility to complete the program, and for endlessly telling me, I might be crazy to try to do it the way I did, but for encouraging my craziness. Thanks to Michael and Kate for providing feedback and editing, and making this readable. vi ABSTRACT Universities have been trying to increase graduation rates for decades. Using Astin's student involvement theory (1984), which posits the more a student is involved at the university, the more likely students will be retained and graduate from the university. Much of the research over the past 20 years has been limited to study the impact of one form of involvement has on retention and graduation, while this study combines different forms of involvement and how they impact retention and graduation rates. This study occurs with a first-year cohort entering fall 2012 at a public four-year university in the Pacific Northwest. While considering students' entering characteristics, this study uses multiple analyses to explore how first semester student involvement (Greek life, Recreation center use, working on campus, etc.) affects first semester GPA, first-semester and first-year retention, and graduation rates. Overall findings show first semester GPA is still the best predictor of six-year graduation rates. The study also showed certain types of student involvement impacts first semester GPA. This impact led to the creation of a weighted Student Involvement Index in an attempt to predict six-year graduation rates. This new Student Involvement Index accurately predicted over 61% of the student outcomes based on student involvement during the first semester at the university.

Co-curricular student leadership and its impact on career readiness

“…Generation Z students are also likely to respond well to hearing how involvement on campus will assist them with their workforce placement and career readiness after graduation (Hyer, 2019;Kulcsár, 2020).…”

“…These theories have been the result of research on student growth and development of traditional college-aged individuals. Through the services and experiences provided for students at institutions of higher education, a goal of student affairs administrators is to ensure that the whole student is being developed (Hirt, 2007;Hyer 2019).…”

“…As Astin's research showed, involvement with peers and others greatly impacts positive growth and development. Students can develop and gain sought after career skills through participation in organizations (Hyer, 2019). Growth begins with the areas that have the most potential and are natural for development within student organizations: communication, teamwork and influencing others, and decision making and problem solving (Kozlowski, 2018).…”