Too Much Grit to Quit? An Examination of Grit in Two Separate Within-Institution Contexts

Abstract

Although the grit narrative—the idea that individual success is as much a product of passion and perseverance as it is a result of intelligence and talent—has captured the public’s imagination, much of the empirical literature has focused almost exclusively on traditional-age college students attending more selective residential universities. The current investigation leveraged two distinct samples of students to explore the association between grit and a wide range of educational outcomes for location-bound and online adult college students. Regression results indicated that the perseverance subscale of grit tended to be a better predictor of persistence and graduation intentions, and social and academic integration, particularly for location-bound adult students, while the passion subscale was a better predictor of actual persistence. The results also suggest that the predictive utility of grit is weaker for online adult college students.