The HERO Within: Exploring Psychological Capital and Community College Students
New Research!!!
I’ve been working in research long enough to know that sometimes the projects you start for one reason end up taking on a life of their own. That’s exactly what happened with this project! This study began as part of my dissertation and slowly evolved into something much bigger: a stand-alone project that turned into a full publication. I’m thrilled that it’s now officially out in Discover Psychology under the title “A Qualitative Exploration of the Presence of Psychological Capital in Community College Student Experiences.”
This paper represents the third and final branch of my dissertation work, but it’s also its own unique piece, a qualitative deep dive into a topic that deserves far more attention than it gets: how community college students experience what’s called psychological capital, or PsyCap for short.
Why Community Colleges Matter
Let’s start with a basic fact that still surprises people: nearly 40% of all college students in the United States are enrolled in community colleges at some point during their education. These institutions are the main entry point into higher education for a wide swath of the population: first-generation students, working adults, people of color, low-income learners, and anyone looking to change careers or pick up new skills later in life. Community colleges are, in many ways, the most democratic part of the American higher education system. Their open-access model makes college possible for people who might otherwise never set foot in a classroom beyond high school. But these institutions are also deeply complex environments, serving students who face unique challenges such as financial stress, family responsibilities, developmental coursework, and sometimes the lingering feeling that higher education wasn’t “meant for them.”
I’ve been there myself. I returned to community college years after my own undergraduate degree, looking to retool my skills and reengage with learning in a new way. That experience gave me a personal understanding of the diverse reasons students come through those doors and the equally diverse barriers they face when trying to persist.
Enter Psychological Capital (PsyCap)
When we talk about student success, the conversation often centers on external supports such as financial aid, tutoring, advising, or structural barriers. Those are all vital, but I’ve always been drawn to the psychological side of success: the internal resources students carry with them, even when everything around them feels uncertain. That’s where psychological capital comes in. PsyCap is a construct that originated in industrial and organizational psychology, developed primarily by Fred Luthans and colleagues in the early 2000s (Luthans et al., 2004; Luthans & Youssef-Morgan, 2017). It’s a framework built around four interrelated components that collectively make up what Luthans calls “the HERO within”:
Hope – the ability to set goals and find pathways to achieve them (Snyder et al., 1991)
Efficacy – confidence in one’s ability to succeed (Bandura, 1997)
Resilience – the capacity to recover from setbacks (Masten et al., 2009)
Optimism – maintaining a positive outlook about the future (Seligman, 1998)
Diagram of HERO constructs
These four elements—Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism—combine to form a kind of psychological toolkit that helps people adapt, persevere, and thrive. Luthans and Youssef-Morgan (2017) describe PsyCap as “state-like,” meaning it can grow or shrink depending on context and experience. In the business world, research has shown that employees with higher PsyCap perform better, adapt more easily, and experience greater satisfaction. What intrigued me was this: while PsyCap has been explored with business professionals, leaders, and somewhat with traditional four-year college students, no one had examined it specifically among community college students, a group whose experiences with success and struggle are often very different.
The Study: Listening to Students’ Stories
For this project, I invited first-semester, full-time students at a community college in New England to share their experiences. Over 200 students responded, and 176 provided open-ended reflections about their sense of hope, confidence, resilience, and optimism as they began their college journey. This was, notably, one of the first qualitative studies I’ve done. Most of my prior work has been quantitative, but there’s something profoundly illuminating about qualitative data: you hear people’s voices, in their own words. You see how theory and lived experience collide.
The survey included four simple but open-ended prompts. We asked students to reflect on challenges they expected to face, how their confidence affected their studies, how they’d overcome past obstacles, and how they imagined a college degree shaping their future. Then we analyzed their responses through thematic coding, first identifying raw ideas and then clustering them into broader categories aligned with the PsyCap framework. The results were illuminating, sometimes inspiring, and sometimes quite sobering.
Hope: The Power (and Fragility) of Willpower and Waypower
C. R. Snyder’s theory of hope distinguishes between two elements: willpower, the determination to pursue goals, and waypower, the ability to find paths around obstacles. Both appeared vividly in the students’ responses. Many students brimmed with motivation: “I love a challenge, so I can’t wait,” one wrote. Another said, “If I keep up with my classes and stay organized, I can do this.” This is classic willpower, goal-directed energy driven by a belief that success is possible. Others focused on waypower, sharing their coping strategies. One student mentioned time blocking and scheduling study periods between work shifts; another discussed learning to manage burnout through small, steady progress. These students weren’t just hopeful, they were practical. They viewed obstacles as problems to be solved rather than signs to turn back.
But not every response was so positive. A striking number of students expressed hopelessness, describing exhaustion, financial insecurity, or mental health struggles that made success feel out of reach. “We can barely afford to live,” one wrote. “I’m not sure I’ll even make it through another semester.” These reflections are painful to read, yet they’re critical. They remind us that hope isn’t evenly distributed. For every student who feels energized, another may be quietly falling behind under the weight of systemic barriers.
Efficacy: Confidence, Self-Doubt, and the Academic Self
Self-efficacy, our belief in our ability to succeed, has long been linked to academic achievement (Bandura, 1997; Zajacova et al., 2005). Among community college students, this confidence is often fragile. Some participants described a strong sense of determination: “The more confident I am, the more I’m willing to work,” one said. That kind of mindset can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, where success fuels confidence, which fuels more success.
But many others reported the opposite: a spiral of self-doubt. One student admitted, “I don’t feel confident enough in my ability to perform well… I have a difficult time starting my assignments.” Several others mentioned being too shy or intimidated to ask questions in class. This pattern aligns with what psychologists sometimes call the inverse self-fulfilling prophecy: low confidence leads to avoidance, which leads to underperformance, which further erodes confidence. When you add in the fact that community college students are more likely to be balancing work, childcare, or returning to school after years away, that downward cycle becomes even steeper.
Resilience: Bouncing Back and Using Assets
Resilience is perhaps the most visible HERO trait among community college students. These are people who often juggle multiple jobs, family obligations, and academic pressures…all while navigating systems not built for their realities. Many participants described resilience not as an abstract concept but as a lived necessity. “You just have to push through; there isn’t another option,” one wrote. Another put it bluntly: “Surviving is necessary.” This wasn’t the toxic positivity that sometimes accompanies discussions of resilience. It was realism. Students acknowledged the emotional toll of “pushing through,” yet they still did it. Some described specific strategies: seeking help from peers, talking to faculty, reorganizing their routines, or finding ways to stay centered.
What stood out to me was how many students connected resilience with hope. One student reflected, “I didn’t handle obstacles well before, but now I’m managing my ADHD and depression. Things are chaotic, but manageable.” That’s resilience in action—the process of turning struggle into structure.
Optimism: Looking Ahead—or Not
Optimism, as Martin Seligman defines it, is an explanatory style: how we interpret success and failure. Optimists attribute success to their own efforts and view failure as temporary or situational.
For some of these students, optimism was tied directly to their goals. Nursing majors spoke passionately about helping others. Others looked forward to stability, travel, or simply being able to support their families. “I feel excited,” one student wrote. “Having a degree will be one of my biggest goals reached.” Yet again, there was a shadow side. A notable number expressed pessimism, fear that a degree might not matter, that they were “not built for school,” or that they had no future. These weren’t just passing anxieties. They reveal the psychological burden many students carry when opportunity feels fragile or conditional.
In a sense, the presence of both optimism and pessimism among the same population underscores the core of PsyCap itself: these constructs don’t operate in isolation. They interact, amplify, and sometimes collide.
The Synergy Effect
One of the most compelling findings from the study was what we called synergy, the overlap and interplay among the PsyCap components. Hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism rarely appeared as discrete categories in students’ responses. Instead, they blended.
Students who were hopeful were often also confident and optimistic. Those who described setbacks frequently spoke about how they’d learned to adapt, showing resilience and renewed hope. This synergy supports Luthans and Youssef-Morgan’s (2017) argument that PsyCap is “greater than the sum of its parts.” It’s a psychological ecosystem with each component feeding the others in dynamic ways.
Interestingly, this synergy also worked in reverse. Students experiencing hopelessness often described parallel self-doubt, pessimism, or a lack of resilience. It’s as if the HERO within has an inverted twin, the anti-HERO lurking in our psyche.
A Dual Reality: Strength and Distress
If I had to summarize this research in one sentence, it’s that community college students embody both remarkable strength and profound distress. Many show evidence of the HERO traits: goal orientation, confidence, adaptability, and a belief in their future. But they also reveal the darker side of each trait: hopelessness, self-doubt, exhaustion, and fear. This dual reality mirrors what we’re seeing nationally. Even before the pandemic, rates of mental health challenges among college students were rising sharply (Lipson et al., 2019; Kay & Schwartz, 2010). For community college students, who are more likely to face socioeconomic hardship and caregiving responsibilities, the stress is compounded (Katz & Davison, 2014). The takeaway isn’t that PsyCap is irrelevant in the face of these challenges; it’s that it becomes even more critical. If we can help students cultivate these psychological strengths early, while also addressing the real-world barriers that erode them, we stand a better chance of improving both persistence and well-being.
The Long Road to Publication
On a more personal note, getting this paper published was its own exercise in resilience. The peer review process took almost a year with multiple rounds of revisions, refinements, and clarifications. My co-author, Karlie Rice, was instrumental throughout that journey, offering insight and clarity as we honed the arguments and strengthened the discussion. We chose to publish in Discover Psychology, an open-access international journal, precisely because I believe research should be accessible. Too much academic work ends up locked behind paywalls. This topic, how we support the psychological well-being of students who make up nearly half of higher education, deserves to be in the hands of educators, administrators, and students themselves.
Looking Ahead
This project doesn’t mark an end so much as a beginning. There’s so much more to explore: how PsyCap develops over time, how interventions might bolster it, and how institutions can build environments that reinforce the HERO within rather than drain it. I see this study as an invitation to fellow researchers, to educators, and to students, to keep asking how we can help people not just get through college but grow through it. Because while PsyCap might start as an academic construct, at its core it’s about something profoundly human: the belief that we can endure, adapt, and imagine better futures for ourselves.
If you’d like to read the full article, it’s available open access in Discover Psychology:
Gamache, K., & Rice, K. (2025). A Qualitative Exploration of the Presence of Psychological Capital in Community College Student Experiences. https://rdcu.be/eLagb
And if you’re a student, educator, or simply someone navigating your own version of the college journey, here’s hoping you keep discovering your own HERO within.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. Freeman.
Lipson, S. K., Lattie, E. G., & Eisenberg, D. (2019). “Increased Rates of Mental Health Service Utilization by U.S. College Students.” Psychiatric Services, 70(1), 60–63.
Luthans, F., & Youssef-Morgan, C. M. (2017). Psychological Capital: An Evidence-Based Positive Approach. Oxford University Press.
Masten, A. S., et al. (2009). Resilience Processes in Development. American Psychologist, 56, 227–239.
Seligman, M. (1998). Learned Optimism. Pocket Books.
Snyder, C. R., et al. (1991). “Hope and Health: Measuring the Will and the Ways.” Handbook of Social and Clinical Psychology. Pergamon.
Zajacova, A., Lynch, S. M., & Espenshade, T. J. (2005). “Self-Efficacy, Stress, and Academic Success in College.” Research in Higher Education, 46(6), 677–706.
