‘The secret to success’. Becoming a successful student in a fast-changing higher education environment

ABSTRACT

The literature on higher education student success offers a considerable set of definitions of this concept, reflecting its semantic polysemy. This is understandable, inasmuch that the highly competitive environment where higher education institutions operate requires that they constantly seek legitimation and competitive advantage based on their students’ success. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the different institutional actors perceive and define higher education student success. The study uses a qualitative methodology and data collection instruments used are semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Results allow concluding that, according to the institutional actors’ perceptions, defining success based solely on academic performance is reductionist and limits this concept to only one sphere of the students’ global experience. The result of academic performance is a quantitative indicator of student success; however, while being necessary, it is not sufficient to define this concept. This indicator has to be complemented by others so that it can be ascertained whether or not a student has achieved success. Students build their perceptions of success based on the multiplicity and complexity of experiences they go through in higher education, influenced by the HEI features and mediated by their personal history and their life project.

KEYWORDS:

• Student success
• student experience
• success perceptions
• higher education
• Portugal

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology under Grant Ref. SFRH/BD/45571/2008.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Maria José Sá holds a Bachelor’s in Education and a PhD in Studies in Higher Education. She is a researcher at CIPES – Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies. Her research areas include, among others: student satisfaction; student success; institutional actors; student experience; and gender studies. She has participated in several funded research projects in the areas of Marketing, Teachers’ training and Student satisfaction. She has also worked in the field of higher education institutions’ assurance of learning (AOL) and international accreditation. She has a substantial number of published papers in international scientific journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. She acts regularly as a reviewer and is an Editorial Board member of international scientific journals. She also acts as an international track chair for a renowned ted international conference on the higher education field.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [Foundation for Science and Technology] under Grant Ref. SFRH/BD/45571/2008.