Psychological Mind-Set and Student Success: The Importance of Internal Locus of Control in Students Who Overachieve

Improving student success outcomes such as persistence and graduation rates remains a priority for higher education institutions, scholars, and advocates. Recent scholarly work argues for more qualitative work in this area to develop a deeper understanding of the issue and to identify more effective ways to increase college completion rates across all populations. This study examines student success by focusing on an understudied population in the literature: overachievers. We define overachievers as students who matriculate in the lowest quartile of an institution’s standardized test score range but are selected and persist as honors students after their first collegiate semester. This phenomenological study highlights the prevalence of a strong internal locus of control among overachievers. Using Bean and Eaton’s student success model as a framework, we explore how our participants operationalized an internal locus of control to achieve academic success in college and consider how higher education institutions can promote this mind-set and its related practices among students on their campuses.