Extracurricular Involvement And Its Effect On Student Success And Student Satisfaction

For many years, academic professionals have studied the effect of student engagement on the student experience. Multiple studies have provided evidence that students who are more heavily engaged tend to see better academic outcomes such as higher GPAs and higher retention rates. These studies, however, tend to look at engagement as a whole and/or center on academic engagement, and not on extracurricular engagement. In this paper, the relationship between student engagement and student success is examines, particularly in regards to engagement in extracurricular activities. First examined are the breadth and depth of student involvement and the correlation to student outcomes such as GPA, job placement and satisfaction ratings. Next, by classifying activities in to 1 of 11 classification types, the correlation between certain types of activities and the outcomes listed above are examined. Certain types of activities tended to correlate more strongly with certain outcomes, where other types of involvement do not tend to correspond with strong outcomes in any success measure.