“Thriving Can Be Whatever Matters to You”: At-Promise Student Perspectives on Thriving in Higher Education

We often hear the term “thriving” used to capture a wide range of positive circumstances related to the human experience. Particularly in higher education, we talk about wanting our students to thrive, to go beyond just surviving, and wanting this for all students. Thriving has become a goal for campuses, with universities developing courses, certificates, or full programs that teach students how to thrive in college. These courses can vary substantially; elements might include mindfulness exercises, coping with trauma, building social relationships, or integrating practices like yoga.

Colloquial uses of thriving abound. But what does the term “thriving” actually mean for postsecondary students? How do we account for diverse student experiences in conceptualizing thriving? And how might we account for power dynamics in the ways that universities approach student thriving? In particular, we are interested in exploring how at-promise students ¹ (i.e., low-income, first-generation, and/or racially minoritized) define and experience thriving. Increased nuance around thriving has the potential to inform how institutions create conditions where all students can thrive.

Thriving in Higher Education

A widely used measure of thriving in the field of higher education comes from Laurie Schreiner's Thriving Quotient (TQ), developed in 2010, where students thrive when they are “fully engaged intellectually, socially, and emotionally.” Stemming from a growth-mindset perspective, Laurie Schreiner argues that a positive perspective can be taught and that educators can be “equipping students with an optimistic explanatory style… and teaching students to develop and apply their strengths.” While Laurie Schreiner's definition of thriving moves beyond traditional notions of success in higher education (determined by Grade Point Average (GPA) and retention) by including psychosocial factors stemming from positive psychology and flourishing, thriving is very much rooted in the individual, emphasizing skills students can develop in order to thrive. College courses on thriving tend to teach students how to cope or adopt a growth mindset as well as how to deal with and overcome their circumstances. Much of the original framing of thriving is identity and power evasive, ignoring the systems and structures that impact individuals’ opportunities to thrive. What does it mean to thrive in spaces that might be classist, sexist, and/or racialized?

Additional literature on thriving in higher education has begun to expand on Laurie Schreiner's work by exploring thriving for students with diverse identities and experiences. As examples, Robert Loren Hill and colleagues’ work from 2021 highlights the implicit and explicit signaling educators and spaces on campus can offer to LGBTQ+ students, particularly emphasizing the importance of finding community within LBGTQ+ spaces; Wilson Okello and David Perez II share a case study to show the barriers that prevent a Latino male student from thriving, illustrating that his high GPA leads to the appearance of success in college, but ignores, and perhaps masks, the discrimination the student experienced on campus. David Nguyen (2021) highlights the complexities that low-income students face when navigating postsecondary environments and discusses the ways students can be successful, through asking for help, taking advantage of career-related opportunities, and utilizing financial knowledge. Genia Bettencourt and Bethany Lisi (2023) turn important attention onto students with disabilities, identifying barriers in higher education that can make it challenging for students with disabilities to thrive.

To inform our thinking on thriving for this article, we draw from Wilson Okello and David Perez II's 2018 case study, where they state, “although Schreiner advocated that educators are responsible for helping college students develop and apply their strengths, her quotient did not account for how systemic oppression determines whether low-income, first-generation, Latino college students thrive.” We also apply Paris Wicker's (2024) critical-relational well-being framework to help us think about how thriving is understood in higher education. Specifically, Paris Wicker's framework explores the role of power and networks in well-being research in higher education, helping us consider power in the ways we are conceptualizing thriving. We push to understand thriving from an ecological perspective, accounting for not just the individual but the systems and structures that shape students’ ability to thrive.

Our Approach

As part of a large-scale, mixed-methods, longitudinal study exploring academic and psychosocial outcomes for at-promise students (Pullias Center for Higher Education's Promoting At-promise Student Success project), we asked study participants what thriving looks like for them. Drawing from 100 hour-long Zoom interviews conducted with first- and second-year students who participated in interviews during the fall 2023 semester, we aimed to let the students’ voices guide us in understanding thriving. Students from three Midwestern universities were invited to participate in interviews if they had an Estimated Family Contribution below $10,000 and had taken a preliminary survey at the start of their first year. In the sample, 43 percent identified as white, 26 percent as Latino/a, 12 percent as Black, and 9 percent as Asian. Fifty-eight percent of the sample were women, with 8 percent of students identifying as queer. Two thirds of the sample were first-generation college students, and a significant number of students came from rural home communities. The sample, while diverse, is limited to students who self-selected into taking the initial survey.

Using an inductive and deductive approach, following the analytic processes outlined by Johnny Saldaña in his 2021 Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, we first created a codebook capturing thriving definition codes from the literature, along with codes that emerged from a preliminary round of interview data exploration. Our research team, which included investigators of varied backgrounds (age, race, social class, professional experience, and disciplinary expertise), solidified our codebook through a process of all four researchers engaging with the data and discussing the merits of various codes. Once we settled on our codebook through discussion and revisiting of transcripts, we proceeded to code the student expressions of thriving.

Thriving Academically, Socially, and Personally

The majority of the ways in which students described thriving fell under three primary categories: academic, social, and personal thriving, along with instances of overlap between these dimensions. Academically thriving encapsulated academic self-efficacy, where students described being proud of themselves; feeling confident in their academics; and making meaningful relationships with faculty and mentors. Socially thriving consisted of having meaningful social relationships and connections with peers; being a part of a community; and feeling like one belongs. Personally thriving captured finding oneself; feeling confident in self (beyond academics); meeting goals; and having things in life fall into place. Additional components of thriving did emerge, such as financial and physical thriving, but these were mentioned much less frequently in the dataset.

The TQ and other conceptualizations of thriving, such as Genia Bettencourt and Bethany Lisi's piece on “Boosting the Signal,” describe multiple dimensions of student thriving and suggest that it is only when a student masters all of the set out dimensions that they are able to fully thrive. Similarly to how we characterized our findings, the three dimensions Genie Bettencourt and Bethany Lisi describe are academic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. However, in our sample, students did not seem to think all dimensions had to be met in order for them to thrive. Students did not think that they had to be thriving academically, socially, and personally simultaneously. Rather, students felt like they were thriving when a dimension (or two or three) was particularly strong. If educators categorize thriving as reached when students meet and sustain all dimensions of thriving, we impose the same notions of success unilaterally onto all students. When Laurie Schreiner discussed the original purpose of developing the concept of thriving, the goal was to move away from traditional markers of success as measured by metrics such as GPA or graduation rates. But in creating a TQ or suggesting a set number of dimensions need to be met for students to thrive, the metrics of success become reframed, with new benchmarks and goals students need to meet. If those metrics of success do not account for diverse ways of being and thriving, practitioners run the risk of reifying hegemonic notions of well-being and thriving. Given that students interact with systems and structures in different ways depending on their lived experiences, their ways of thriving also differ.

If those metrics of success do not account for diverse ways of being and thriving, practitioners run the risk of reifying hegemonic notions of well-being and thriving

How At-Promise Students Describe Their Thriving

In looking at students’ definitions of thriving in their own words, we identified a number of ways through which students experience thriving. As one example, a student shared: “I think it's me meeting my goals… knowing that I did the best that I could. I'm just checking off the boxes.” In this case, the student and her own personal goals mattered most. Another student put it slightly differently: “[thriving] can be whatever matters to you. It could be academically, it could be mental headspace, it could be socially, or it could be all of them.” This student identified multiple dimensions of thriving and suggested thriving could be experienced across all of the dimensions—or have a focus and prioritization of one. Other students identified a specific time, which they could point to as “thriving,” such as this explanation:

During finals week of this semester, because I felt like I really understood every concept in every class. I had time to study. I had time to work out, spend time with my family. I really figured out how to spend my time wisely and to not waste six hours studying because I realized that maybe only the first three hours really benefit me.

Another example of thriving was in connection to overcoming a challenge, as described by this student:

I liked all of my classes… [but it] wasn’t a super easy time. They were giving me enough challenges that I felt like I was actually learning something and having to try… but it wasn’t so challenging that it made me cry from the stress of it. So, I think that is my happy thriving. I'm busy enough that I don’t feel like I'm wasting my time, but I'm not so busy that I don’t have enough time.

Faculty and supportive institutional agents can have a significant impact on student success. Multiple students mentioned the role of faculty in influencing thriving; having a faculty member validate and empower a student can be the difference in how that student progresses. As one student put it,

I definitely think my professor giving me the complement of ‘you did great.’ This project was the best moment of my entire semester, I think, because throughout the whole semester he did [acknowledge] bits and pieces of my work, but there was never a project where he was like, oh, this is great. But my whole final project, he was really happy and satisfied with it, and I felt like he was proud of me as well, seeing how far I've came.

Implications for Higher Education

In the majority of interviews, students took personal responsibility for their ability to thrive and seldom acknowledged the role of context or institutional support in fostering an environment conducive to thriving. Students’ definitions of thriving appeared to differ based on their priorities, identities, communities, values, and how the structures around them empower or make thriving more challenging. Students (as with many of us) have been socialized to persevere through independence and personal responsibility. Many students do find value and build self-confidence as they reach moments of thriving. Our argument here is not to take away individual agency that empowers students and builds their confidence. But we do not want to reduce thriving to something innate that must be found or independently pursued. Positive perspective is not something you either have or do not have, it is shaped and influenced by external and internal forces. Following Paris Wicker's work asking us to contextualize the role of power in shaping well-being, as educators, we can influence some of the external forces on campus and can be guided by what matters to students.

As educators, we can influence some of the external forces on campus and can be guided by what matters to students.

For example, in university courses created to teach students how to thrive, components could be geared toward giving students skills to cope along with helping them understand how the postsecondary institutions they navigate function. Efforts can be made to illuminate the hidden curriculum of higher education that many first-generation students may not be familiar with. Further, students shared how appropriately challenging environments, such as the work described by Daniel Brown and colleagues, can help them grow academically and thrive as students. Creating situations that are appropriately scaffolded, where students are guided in learning and pushing themselves, can foster opportunities for student thriving that do not require changes that necessitate additional funding, organizations, or resources.

Future Directions

While this work looked at at-promise student experiences broadly, future work would benefit from exploring how specific student identities differently shape how students experience and navigate thriving, along with the opportunities of thriving that are afforded to them. While our analysis did not consider how specific factors such as race, class, or gender identity differentially shape student experiences, there can be value in identifying the ways that racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of oppression shape higher education and can influence students’ thriving. Helping students thrive can be done through a tailored approach, where educators on campus learn about the students they work with most closely and identify ways through which to support each specific student's thriving. What is important is understanding that different students can have different views of what success and thriving look like to them.

Ultimately, leaders can work toward cultivating a campus culture that supports the thriving of students in multifaceted ways. Centering students’ perspectives on thriving and remaining flexible as to what supports might enable thriving is key. If faculty can better get to know their students, they can establish a culture where they consistently recognize and validate students’ experiences. In addition, many resources already exist on campus that are geared toward specific student identities and can support students through a more holistic approach. Therefore, communicating resources to support the thriving of students as they progress through their college journey is important. While opportunities to support student thriving do exist in higher education, educators and practitioners can benefit from a broader understanding of what thriving means for individual students—an approach where we do not assume the ways in which we expect students to succeed but rather let students guide us toward what thriving means to them.