Aspirational Endurance: Coping and Adjustment among First-Year Students at a Provincial Philippine State University
Keywords:
first-year students; college adjustment; coping strategies; aspirational endurance; Philippine higher educationAbstract
The first-year college transition is often discussed in terms of stress, vulnerability, and adjustment difficulty. Less attention has been paid to how students in provincial public universities make sense of these demands in relation to family expectations, peer support, and imagined futures. This qualitative descriptive study explored the coping and adjustment experiences of first-year students at a provincial state university in the Philippines. Seventy students first completed an open-ended questionnaire, and then 20 were purposively selected for face-to-face semi-structured interviews based on the relevance and depth of their responses. The data was examined through conventional content analysis, with the questionnaire responses used for screening and contextual triangulation. Three themes developed from the findings: students understood academic strain as an expected part of college life; they draw mainly on their peers and close relationships for academic and emotional support; and they interpreted this adjustment as a gradual movement toward greater responsibility, independence, and discipline. These patterns suggest aspirational endurance, understood in this study as a context-sensitive interpretive lens rather than as a validated psychological construct. It refers to the way students connect their present academic hardship with personal growth, family hopes, and longer-term mobility. This study contributes to first-year transition research by showing that coping is shaped not only by stress and support but also by the meanings students attach to endurance in a provincial Philippine higher education setting.
https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.25.6.44
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