Academic resilience’ refers to a student’s capacity to overcome acute or chronic adversities that are
seen as major assaults on educational processes. Although intersecting with highly vulnerable and
important populations, academic resilience does not map onto the many students who are faced
with setbacks, challenges and pressures that are part of more regular academic life. This, it is argued,
reflects ‘academic buoyancy’ that maps onto the many students who must negotiate the ups and
downs of everyday academic life as distinct from acute and chronic adversities relevant to more
traditional constructions of academic resilience. Inherent in this argument, then, is a proposed hierarchical
framework in which academic buoyancy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
academic resilience. Such a hierarchical framework, therefore, has the potential to speak to all
students and so represents an encompassing framework that can more fully explain the nature and
extent of adversities and challenges that are part of academic life. We further contend that academic
resilience and academic buoyancy require multidimensional approaches to their conceptualising
and measurement in order to most effectively differentiate the factors that are (and are not) components,
causes, correlates and cognate to them. We conclude by proposing a number of conceptual
and empirical approaches to a next generation of research into academic resilience and academic
buoyancy, develop the notion of ‘leading’ and ‘lagging’ indicators of buoyancy and resilience, and
identify the implications of our framework for intervention and policy in the academic domain and
beyond.