CHAPTER ONE
Studying College Outcomes in the 2000s

Overview and Organization of the Research

The purpose and value of higher education are under fire. As national confidence in the aims of higher education and the subsequent value of degree attainment erode (see Arum & Roksa, 2011, 2014), scholars interested in college and its influence on students are faced with a series of emergent challenges, ranging from the decoupling of the once tightly held belief that participation in higher education was the primary means for learning and thus social mobility to ontological questions about learning itself: Is learning about making money? Why is learning important if it does not lead to financial gain? Indeed, some students are paid to forgo college-going for pursuing entrepreneurial start-ups. Peter Thiel, founder of the Thiel Foundation, an organization that pays up-and-coming entrepreneurs to leave formal education, noted, "University administrators are the equivalent of mortgage brokers, selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties" (Jenkins, 2010, p. A.13). This comment exemplifies the emergent American learning conundrum: How utilitarian and pragmatic does learning need to be in order to hold value in and to American society? Is higher education an investment in one's future or a consumable good of questionable value?

In light of these questions and challenges, educators from across disciplines are designing and executing rigorous college impact studies that draw on the scholarly work of generations past to further develop a robust understanding of college as critical to not only the learning enterprise but to other social and economic factors as well. Rather than shy away from the difficulties of studying outcomes that many think are ineffable and even irrelevant, these scholars are approaching the study of college impact with the thoroughness needed to appraise historic claims regarding the roles and purposes of higher education and the innovation needed to tackle questions once believed too challenging to address. Our aim in this volume is not to provide silver-bullet answers to these pressing and difficult questions but to review carefully the evidence for helping educators make claims about college and its impact on students.

Conceptually, this volume is based on Astin's (1984) framework for understanding how college affects students. Put simply, this framework deconstructs the college experiences into three discrete categories: inputs, environments, and outcomes. Inputs include demographic characteristics, academic preparedness, and predispositions that students bring with them to campus (e.g., race, high school grade point average, SAT scores, degree aspirations, and academic motivation, to name a few). Environments include, but are not limited to, institutional cultures and climates and specific educational experiences designed to shape students in some meaningful way. Outcomes relate to the attitudes (e.g., student satisfaction), aptitudes (e.g., critical thinking), and behaviors (e.g., departure) that students exhibit as a result of going to college.

Of critical importance to this review is how these categories work together to explain college and its effects on students. When organizing studies, we based our review on two relationships: that which we call "general" to describe the relationship between environments and outcomes (i.e., how exposure to and participation in college generally affect all college students) and that which we call "conditional" to underscore the relationship between environments and outcomes as it relates to student inputs (i.e., how exposure to and participation in college experiences affect students differentially based on students' input characteristics).

Figure 1.1 is a graphic representation of Astin's model. These relationships are represented by the dotted arrows in the figure. Note that the relationship between inputs and outcomes is displayed with a solid arrow to reflect that the review did not focus on studies that examined this relationship.

With this conceptual map as our guide, we used the organizational framework developed by Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini (1991, 2005) to synthesize the many thousands of empirically based articles designed to better understand college and its relationship to student outcomes. Building on the generous work of many scholars and employing the organizational framework used in the previous two volumes of this work, we addressed each of these six issues for each set of outcomes: the development of verbal, quantitative, and subject matter competence; cognitive skills and intellectual growth; psychosocial change; attitudes and values; moral development; educational attainment and persistence; career and economic impacts of college; and quality of life after college. Specifically, we adopted Pascarella and Terenzini's six-question framework for organizing the literature within each chapter. This framework, which developed out of previous work by G. Gurin (1971), Nucci and Pascarella (1987), and Pascarella (1985), asks six basic questions that serve as the organizing feature for each chapter:

1. What evidence is there that individuals change during the time in which they are attending college?
2. What evidence is there that change or development during college is the result of college attendance?
3. What evidence is there that attending different kinds of postsecondary institutions have a differential influence on student change and development during college?
4. What evidence exists that engaging in different experiences in the same institution are associated with student change and development during college?
5. What evidence is there that the collegiate experience produces conditional, as opposed to general, effects on student change or development?
6. What are the long-term effects of college?

Question 1, which we sometimes refer to by the shorter phrasing of "change during college," refers to whether change occurred while students were exposed to postsecondary education. Question 2, regarding the net effects of college, focuses on whether the change is attributed to postsecondary exposure, as opposed to precollege characteristics, maturation, or other noncollege experiences. Question 3, between-college effects, explores the degree to which institutional conditions (e.g., size, control, geographic location) or organizational characteristics (e.g., average level of peer cognitive development, whether the school is bureaucratic or collegial, structural diversity of the faculty) have an influence on the learning and development of the student. Question 4, within-college effects, summarizes the articles that address student change as a function of exposure to or participation in specific collegiate experiences. Question 5, conditional effects of college, gauges the extent to which the relationship between student change and any given college experience differs based on student characteristics, such as race, gender, or academic major. Question 6, long-term effects of college, addresses the duration or permanence of the college influence based on student's postcollege activities, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Table 1.1 summarizes the framework used to guide this review.

Table 1.1 Overview of Review Framework