Study to Live or Live to Study: The Link between Social Role Investment and Academic Success in First-Year Higher Education Students

Abstract

Becoming a student, i.e., learning a set of new skills and lifestyles is an inevitable task for young people joining higher education (HE). Using Perrenoud’s (1995) conceptualization of the student’s role as a theoretical framework, this paper intends to reflect on the construction of students’ identities and its repercussions on their academic success through analysis of the discourse between HE students. How students try to intertwine their personal lives with the demands of their new roles as higher education students is also discussed. Qualitative data analysis was conducted using semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 30 engineering students. Our analysis of the results confirmed that attending HE can indeed be conceptualized as the exercise of a “craft”. This craft could be taught in different ways, with more or less success, in the light of the construction of one’s own social identity with more focus on either their role as student or their role as a young person. The results allow for the emergence of a conceptual framework which, crossing the investment in their social role as students with academic success, brings out distinctive dimensions: “Live to Study”, “Study to Live”, “Study without living” and “Live without study”. These dimensions provide four major student profiles that can advise the management of higher education institutions to strategically take actions to promote not only student success, but also the pedagogic efficiency of their educational programs.