Abstract

Higher education prepares students for increasingly complex contexts characterised by adversity. However, current educational perspectives primarily focus on coping, resilience, and returning to a baseline state. Literature offers limited insight into how adversity can be leveraged to contribute to learning and development. Our study explores antifragility, the capacity to turn adversity into an advantage, as an alternative perspective on how students learn during challenging experiences. Through a cross-disciplinary conceptual systematic review, we synthesised 172 peer-reviewed publications. Using iterative thematic coding, four components of antifragility were identified: adversity exposure, stress appraisal, adaptive response, and adversity capital, which represents the accumulated developmental gains and losses from experiences with adversity. Antifragility emerged as a dynamic, relational process. It is shaped by interactions between individuals, communities, organisations, and wider systems. Indicators that may help assess whether antifragility develops include behavioural, performance-based, and physiological factors. We found that the development of antifragility appears to depend on the calibration of adversity; it is supported by safety, flexibility, recurring challenges, experimentation, and reflective feedback, whereas overprotection, excessive stress, rigidity, risk avoidance, and insufficient support constrain it. These findings provide a foundation for understanding how adversity may contribute to learning and development in higher education. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on how higher education can help students respond to adversity by bringing together cross-disciplinary insights into the conceptualisation, indicators, and conditions of antifragility in higher education.

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