Friendships and Their Influence on Academic Success

Janice M. McCabe might not have studied the complex interactions of college students’ academic and social lives if she had not almost missed out on experiencing their richness.

In her final year as an undergraduate at Tulane University, she and several fellow women’s-studies students came to a sobering realization, says Ms. McCabe, whose Connecting in College: How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success appeared last month (University of Chicago Press). They had been so intent on the tenets of their field, such as that “the personal is political,” she says, that “we all lacked the strong friendships of other women that we expected to find in college, especially as women’s-studies majors.”

From Dartmouth College, where she is now an associate professor of sociology who is affiliated with the women’s, gender, and sexuality-studies program, Ms. McCabe says, “I thought it was just me — that I didn’t have deep friendships. But talking about it with these other women, we realized none of us had that, and we were all looking for it.”

Their remedy: a friendship-promoting group research study of how common their own experience was on their campus.

That project, 17 years ago, was the germination of Ms. McCabe’s book. It explores a surprisingly still little-studied subject: the varieties of friendships on campus, and how they can help, and hinder, both social growth and academic accomplishment.

She studied a Midwestern university where campus activities were sufficiently plentiful that even wallflowers would most likely stumble into a social life. Students had a matrix of friendship arrangements, she found, with three predominant types: compartmentalizers, such as she had been, who have two to four clusters of friends but few of what she refers to as “friends with academic benefits”; tight-knitters, with one densely woven friendship group; and samplers, who make scattered friends and who tend to be self-reliant both socially and academically.

Ms. McCabe tested the relationships among these three types of friendship arrangements and such variables as academic accomplishment, gender, housing type, socioeconomic background, and race. Among her findings was that minority students tended to be tight-knitters, which provided them with academic support and a defense against racism, although some group members sacrificed their own success to group interests.

Ms. McCabe says her study should discourage one-size-fits-all approaches to improving student satisfaction and achievement. Among her suggestions: Parents can encourage extracurricular engagement without hovering; faculty members can set friendship-inducing group assignments; administrators can promote their campus’s range of student activities.

As for students, many of those she interviewed extolled the academic benefits of balancing — and, indeed, combining — the social and the academic. “I was really generally impressed with students’ strategies and with how resilient a lot of students are,” she says. “They were really trying a lot of things to succeed academically and socially.”