Abstract:

Higher education is something many people aspire to. As such, when people reach this goal and complete a graduate’s degree, a Master’s degree, or even a Ph.D., it comes as no surprise that this accomplishment may be linked with a positive self-evaluation and, thus, impact satisfaction with life favourably. However, completing such a degree requires a high level of self-regulation and could become more difficult if a student procrastinates continuously. Consequently, we set out to compare satisfaction with life, procrastination among students with and students without university education.

Based on a cross-sectional dataset including N = 2063 Spanish participants aged between 18 and 29 years old (M = 22.75 SD = 3.26), we analysed Pearson correlations between university education (attended versus did not attend), satisfaction with life, self-regulation (goals setting, learning from mistakes, decision making, and perseverance), and procrastination (decisional procrastination, implemental delay, lateness). Via linear regression analyses and mean comparisons we assess the role of university education, self-regulation and procrastination in explaining variations in satisfaction with life.

Findings show that students who have attended and completed university education report higher satisfaction with life than their counterparts who have not completed university degrees. Also their self-regulation is higher and their procrastination is lower than their non-university students counterparts. Fifteen percent (R2 = .15***) of variations in satisfaction with life are explained by variations in decisional procrastination (ß = -.12***), goal setting (ß = .18***), learning from mistakes (ß = .10***), and highest accomplished educational level (ß = .10***).

It has been long argued that procrastination is a problem typical of students. However, it has not been established if all students are equal in respect to this behaviour, or if contrarily, students who accomplish to complete university degrees might procrastinate less than others. Furthermore, it has been discussed how self-regulation is key for students’ success but it has not been assessed comparing self-regulation among students with and without university degrees. And lastly, it is known that —as William James put it– self-esteem or, in our case, satisfaction with life, is linked with the accomplishment of our pretensions, and as such we suggest that accomplishing to complete a university education via self-regulation and avoidance of procrastination may play a role in this successful educational trajectory and its corresponding cognitive report of subjective wellbeing.

Keywords:

Higher education, university students, satisfaction with life, self-regulation, procrastination, social psychology.