Psychological hardiness in learning and quality of college life of business students: evidence from Vietnam

Abstract

Vietnam’s continuing economic transformation has sharply increased the demand for highly-qualified business graduates. Vietnamese universities have responded to this increase in demand by improving the quality of their programs and raising their performance standards. The degree to which high-quality competitive programs increase students’ satisfaction with their educational experience is determined by their psychological hardiness in learning, their learning motivation, and their assessments of the functional value of business education. This study gathered survey data from a convenience sample of 1,024 business students in Vietnam, then validated measures of four constructs: Quality of College Life, psychological hardiness in learning, learning motivation, and perceived functional value of business education. The relationships among the constructs were estimated by Structural Equation Modeling. The results demonstrate that psychological hardiness in learning and learning motivation have statistically significant positive impacts on students’ perceived Quality of College Life. The impacts are significantly stronger for students with higher assessments of the functional value of a business education. These findings suggest that universities could enhance the Quality of College Life and academic performance by offering programs to cultivate students’ psychological hardiness in learning and their learning motivation, and by providing them with objective information about the functional value of business careers.