Goal Congruence and Positivity Toward College Major: The Role of Self-Connection

Promoting college student retention and career success remains a primary goal for higher education. Toward this end, we examined the role of goal congruity and self-connection in the extent to which students feel positivity toward their major. Specifically, we tested the role of self-connection in the relationship between goals and positivity toward college major among 188 college students. When we examined communal goals, a moderated indirect effect emerged, suggesting that communal goals related to self-connection only when students' majors did not provide communal affordances. For agentic goals, an indirect effect emerged such that endorsing agentic goals (regardless of agentic affordances) promoted self-connection. In both cases, self-connection then related to views toward one's major. These results suggest that communicating the communal value of majors to college students might promote self-connection and have positive implications for retention of college students. Furthermore, encouraging students to consider their communal and agentic goals might lead to feeling positively toward their major.