| Nearly one third of freshmen do not return to college for a second year. Student engagement, the focus of an abundance of academic research, is considered a critical factor of student retention. There has also been a wealth of research gathered on student personality with relationship to various factors of college success and experience. Missing in the literature is an examination of the multivariate relationship between the multifaceted concepts of personality style and student engagement. Archival data that included 5 subscale scores on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and 8 thinking style scale scores from the Millon Index of Personality Styles Revised (MIPS-R) were obtained from students (N = 130) at a small, private college in the Midwest. The NSSE is rooted in Chickering's theory of student development and in Astin's theory of student involvement, while the MIPS-R is rooted in Jung's psychological types and Millon's evolutionary theory of personality. In a canonical correlation analysis, the first of the 5 dimensions was significant, in which there was a large effect of 25% overlapping variance between the engagement and thinking styles sets. Based on the standardized coefficients, canonical loadings, and cross-loadings, a key association was found between having an externally focused personality thinking style, not having an internally focused personality style, and viewing the campus environment as supportive. Findings suggest that positive social change, particularly student retention, could result by presenting the campus environment as stable and supportive and by catering to students' innate personality styles, especially those who are internally focused, by providing an early safety net that allows them to develop personal autonomy in the college environment. |
