Studying College Students in the 21st Century: Meeting New Challenges

Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini

Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with the paradox: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ." To some extent, those of us doing research on the impacts of college on students confront a similar (if less life-threatening) set of conditions. We are enjoying "the best of times" because we currently have a pretty good idea of the institutional and psychosocial conditions that contribute to an effective undergraduate education. Indeed, one might reasonably argue that our theories, knowledge base, and research tools are more developed and sophisticated than at any time before. From the vast and complex body of research evidence on the impact of college on students (e.g., Astin, 1977, 1993; Astin & Panos, 1969; Chickering & Reisser, 1993; Feldman & Newcomb, 1969; Knox, Lindsey, & Kolb, 1993; Kuh, Douglas, Lund, & Ramin-Gyurnek, 1994; Kuh, Schuh, Whitt, & Associates, 1991; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991), we know a number of the conditions that foster student learning and development. These conditions include (among others) small institutional size, a strong faculty emphasis on teaching and student development, a student body that attends [End Page 151] college full-time and resides on-campus, a common general education emphasis or shared intellectual experience in the curriculum, and frequent interaction in- and outside the classroom between students and faculty and between students and their peers.

We may also, however, be entering "the worst of times" in that a shrinking percentage of undergraduate students in American postsecondary education are likely to experience those conditions in the future. Indeed, the confluence of a number of demographic, institutional, economic, and technological forces may not only alter fundamentally the way we think about what it means to go to college but also change the methodologies we now use to assess the impact of college. Moreover, such forces may well require us to rethink--perhaps even redefine--what we consider to be the desired outcomes of an undergraduate education.

The Changing Undergraduate Student Population

When we published our synthesis of studies conducted between 1968 and 1988 on the impact of college on students (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991), we confronted the sobering realization that the 2,600 or so studies we reviewed did not necessarily provide a complete or comprehensive portrait of the American undergraduate student population. The reason is pretty straightforward. When Willie Sutton, the notorious bank robber, was asked why he robbed banks, he reputedly answered: "Because that's where the money is." In our synthesis we went "where evidence was," and that extant body of research was not without substantial bias. With some notable exceptions, it was based largely on samples of "traditional," white undergraduate college students ages 18-22 who attended four-year institutions full-time, who lived on campus, who didn't work, and who had few, if any, family responsibilities.

In short, the knowledge base for How College Affects Students permitted us to draw conclusions about a population of students that no longer dominates American postsecondary education. This major, if unavoidable, limitation on our work was not lost on reviewers. For example, writing in Educational Researcher, Stage (1993) cogently observed:

Ironically, just as analysis of the experiences of college students reached an apex in terms of quantitative "technique and vigor," the population of interest began shifting. Now at the end of the 2 decades, our college campuses are no longer predominantly populated by the students described in this book. (pp. 22-23)

The growing diversity of the undergraduate student body in American postsecondary education has been well documented over an extended period of time (see, for example, Hodgkinson, 1985; Levine & Associates, 1989). [End Page 152] One need only examine the 1996 Chronicle of Higher Education: Almanac Issue to get a feel for this diversity. For example, from 1984 to 1994, the total number of white undergraduates in American colleges and universities increased by 5.1%. This growth compares to a 61% jump in the number of Asian, Hispanic, African American, and Native American undergraduates during the same period of time. In 1984, nonwhite students (i.e., Asian, Hispanic, African American, Native American) constituted 18.4% of the total national undergraduate population, while in 1994 they accounted for 25.7% of the national undergraduate population. By 1993, slightly more than 40% of all undergraduates were 25 years of age or older, and nearly 27% were 30 or more years old. In 1996, nearly 43% of all undergraduates were attending college on a part-time basis. Moreover, according to a recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics (1996), a substantial number of students attending college full-time also have jobs. In 1993, 46% of all full-time, college students ages 18 to 24 were employed, and more than half of these worked at least 20 hours per week.

This issue of dramatically increasing student diversity will, we believe, have significant, and perhaps even profound, implications for future research on the impact of college on students. First, that research will simply be more difficult to do. It is one thing to conduct longitudinal research on an intact cohort of full-time students, living on campus, who have no work or family responsibilities, and who progress through their college years at about the same rate. (Indeed, the fact that such students have represented something akin to a captive audience perhaps at least partially explains why they have been the focus of the vast majority of college impact studies.) It is quite another thing, however, to conduct longitudinal research with students who are on campus only part-time, who commute to college, who have major work and/or family responsibilities, and whose rates of educational progress are as varied as the students themselves. Our recent experience with the federally funded National Study of Student Learning, a three-year longitudinal study of the factors influencing learning and cognitive growth in 23 institutions from around the country, clearly underscores this point. Part-time, commuter students who had work responsibilities were significantly less likely to sustain their participation in the study over three years than their full-time, resident, non-working counterparts.

Second, increased student diversity means that we have to devote more time and energy to the exploration of conditional effects in studies of college impact. Studies of general effects, which dominate the college impact literature, examine whether a particular experience (e.g., athletic participation, Greek affiliation, attending a two-year versus a four-year college) has the same basic impact for all students. Studies of conditional (or interaction) effects, on the other hand, explore whether the impact of any particular [End Page 153] experience differs in magnitude for different kinds of students. In a very real sense, a concern with estimating conditional effects acknowledges that student diversity may play a significant role in shaping the impact of college. Not surprisingly, when we completed our synthesis of evidence for How College Affects Students we were struck by how little attention, relatively speaking, had been paid to the search for conditional effects in the vast body of studies conducted between 1968 and 1988. At the same time that the diversity of American undergraduate students was growing sharply, researchers studying college's effects on students tended to overlook or disregard the significance of this demographic sea change in the research and analytic designs of their studies. As a result, it is entirely possible that a substantial number of the conclusions yielded by our synthesis mask the presence of important conditional effects that were never estimated in the body of evidence.

Recent college impact research underscores the extent to which changes in student demographic characteristics may influence the effects of different college experiences (e.g., Pascarella, Bohr, Nora, & Terenzini, 1995a, 1995b; Pascarella, Edison, Hagedorn, Nora, & Terenzini, 1996a, 1996b; Terenzini, Springer, Yeager, Pascarella, & Nora, 1996). For example, a recent investigation from the National Study of Student Learning (Pascarella, Edison, Whitt, Nora, Hagedorn, & Terenzini, 1996) found that the cognitive effects of fraternity membership during the first year of college depended on student ethnicity. Fraternity membership had a significant negative net influence on the cognitive growth of white men but a slightly positive influence on the cognitive growth among men of color. Similarly, in a recent study of socio-cognitive development, the factors influencing growth for Anglo-American students were essentially unrelated to the growth of Chicano students (Durham, Hays, & Martinez, 1994).

Third, major shifts in the kinds of students populating American colleges and universities may mean that we need to rethink or expand our concepts about the outcomes of postsecondary education. Scholars concerned with the impact of college on students (ourselves included) have perhaps taken an overly narrow view of what constitutes desirable outcomes or effects. Our research questions and the outcomes we consider have frequently been shaped by our own college experience as well as by the ethos of the research-oriented and often residential institutions where we work and where students to study are abundant and easily reachable. The focus has been largely on outcomes traditionally valued by an academic community committed to the ideal of liberal education in a residential setting (e.g., intellectual values, critical thinking, tolerance, intellectual flexibility, and liberalization of social attitudes). Certainly, there is nothing wrong with investigating the impact of the postsecondary experience on such outcomes. However, scholars of college impacts on students have been substantially [End Page 154] less sensitive to the kinds of personal growth and maturing that may occur when students must meet work, family, and educational responsibilities simultaneously. The challenges confronting such students may lead to substantial growth along dimensions not typically considered in the existing body of research. Indeed, some of our most cherished ideas about the important purposes and outcomes of a postsecondary education may have little relevance for an increasing number of undergraduate students.

Finally, the increasing student diversity is likely to strain severely the notion that any one dominant or traditional approach to inquiry will be sufficient to portray accurately the impact of college. As student diversity increases, understanding the experience of college and its various impacts will undoubtedly become much more complex. Research approaches that try to isolate the influence of a few variables for all students will simply miss the point and probably provide little in the way of useful, practice- or policy-relevant evidence. If there was ever a time when we needed a broad repertoire of approaches to inquiry in research on the impact of college, it is now.

The Increasing Importance Of Community Colleges

The dramatic increase in student diversity in American postsecondary education has paralleled the growth in the importance of the two-year, community college. For example, Terenzini (1996), citing evidence from the National Center on Education Statistics (1994) and the Chronicle of Higher Education: Almanac Issue (1995), points out that, between 1978 and 1991, enrollment in two-year colleges rose by 31% (versus 23% for four-year institutions); and two-year college enrollments are expected to increase another 11% by 2003. Currently, two-year institutions constitute about 28% of all U.S. colleges and universities and enroll about 37% of all students.

Clearly, community colleges are major players in the national system of postsecondary education; but with a few notable exceptions in the literature, precious little is known about their impacts on students. While it may be the case that four of every ten American college students are enrolled in community colleges, it would be a very liberal estimate to say that even 5% of the studies we reviewed for How College Affects Students focused on community college students. (Perhaps a more accurate, if less marketable, title for our book would have been How Four-Year Colleges Affect Students.) This empirical black hole means that we are functioning in virtual ignorance of the educational impact of one of the nation's most significant social institutions.

Perhaps a major reason for ignoring community colleges and the richly diverse but nontraditional students who attend them is that only one or two models dominate conceptions of institutional excellence in American postsecondary education. As we have pointed out elsewhere (Pascarella, 1997), a relatively small number of research universities and elite liberal [End Page 155] arts colleges have set the academic and public standard for what most Americans believe higher education is or should be about. The hallmarks of these institutions include such factors as faculty with strong research or scholarly orientations, selective admissions policies, and undergraduate student bodies that are largely residential, full-time, traditional age, non-working, non-minority, and of middle- or upper middle-class social origins. Significant numbers of people inside and outside higher education believe that such institutions provide the highest quality undergraduate education possible; and the more an institution deviates from this set of standards, the lower it is ranked in terms of prestige or perceived educational excellence, and the more invisible it becomes. By the time one gets to community colleges, with their open admissions policies, faculties rewarded essentially for teaching, and their disproportionate numbers of non-resident, part-time, older, non-white, and working class students, they are virtually off the radar screen in terms of public recognition or concern. Add to this the fact that part-time, working, commuter students are extremely difficult to study, plus the fact that community colleges may often lack the institutional resources to support ongoing assessment and research efforts, and it becomes readily apparent why we know so little about the educational impact of community colleges.

The serious danger, of course, is that, in the absence of systematic research evidence, higher educational policy makers will rely on beliefs, stereotypes, and even publicly accepted myths in making judgments about the educational effectiveness and funding priority of community colleges. Unfortunately, as Dougherty (1994) points out, the dominant view of both the higher education establishment and the public at large is that community colleges form a "peripheral part of the collegiate system, a catch basin for those few students unable or unwilling to enter 'regular' colleges" (p. 3). As such, community colleges are perceived as offering a second-best educational experience that penalizes students intellectually, socially, occupationally, and economically when compared to those students who attend four-year institutions.

What evidence does exist suggests that the reality is somewhat more complex than the prevailing belief. On the one hand, the evidence indicates that students aspiring to a bachelor's degree are about 15% less likely to obtain it if they begin postsecondary education at a community college rather than at a four-year institution (Dougherty, 1994; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). On the other hand, any relative disadvantages in bachelor's degree attainment do not necessarily translate into long-term labor market disadvantages. Community college students who successfully negotiate the challenges of transferring to a four-year institution and who complete their bachelor's degree appear to achieve overall parity with similar four-year college students in such areas as job prestige, stability of employment, job satisfaction, [End Page 156] and earnings (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991; Smart & Ethington, 1985; Whitaker & Pascarella, 1994).

A small body of evidence also suggests that the developmental impacts of community colleges and four-year colleges and universities may be quite similar along a variety of dimensions. These include cognitive gains in reading comprehension, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, writing skills, and science reasoning, as well as increases in students' enjoyment of intellectual challenge and diversity, enjoyment of higher order cognitive tasks, and internal locus of attribution for academic success or failure (Pascarella, Bohr, Nora, & Terenzini, 1995a; Pascarella, Edison, Nora, Hagedorn, & Terenzini, 1995-1996; Pascarella, Edison, Hagedorn, Nora, & Terenzini, 1996a; Pascarella, Bohr, Nora, Ranganathan, Desler, & Bulakowski, 1994).

Unfortunately, however, the existing body of evidence on the impact of community colleges constitutes little more than the initial charting of the most rudimentary landmarks in essentially unexplored terrain. The nature of community colleges and the characteristics and enrollment patterns of the students they serve make it difficult to study community colleges' impact. Higher education practitioners and policy makers, however, cannot afford to spend another decade in ignorance of the educational influence of a set of institutions that educate nearly 40% of our students.

Shrinking Financial Support For Higher Education

After decades of generous public and private support, American postsecondary education now clearly finds itself facing serious questions and concerns about the efficiency and effectiveness of colleges and universities. As Ewell (1991) has pointed out, in an era of limited resources, pressure increases for public investments to yield demonstrable results, especially in comparison to other competing demands on public resources. Indeed, since the late 1960s a large body of literature has developed around accountability and the need for colleges and universities to provide reasonably clear and broadly acceptable indicators of what they do and how well they do it (Aper & Hinkle, 1991). This mandate for the public accountability of postsecondary institutions is likely to continue well into the next century.

One response to pressures for accountability is for institutions to produce evidence that they do in fact foster the cognitive and personal growth of their students. We believe, however, that simply showing a significant impact on desired educational outcomes will not be sufficient. The current (and probably future) definition of public accountability involves a concern with costs as well as benefits. Thus, studies that attempt to determine just how much colleges and universities influence student growth and development may well confront the question of how much it costs to achieve that growth. [End Page 157]

The concern with costs and cost-benefit ratios is likely to have a profound impact on the way in which we conduct research on the impact of college on students. In the 1,500 studies reviewed by Feldman and Newcomb (1969) and in the 2,600 studies synthesized in How College Affects Students (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991), the focus was almost exclusively on the relative benefits of college or different college experiences. (The possible exception may be studies of the private rate of economic return to a college degree.) For example, an extensive experimental literature examines the impact of the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI). The major focus of this body of research, however, is in estimating the magnitude of the learning advantages of PSI over more traditional methods of instruction (e.g., Kulik, Kulik, & Carmichael, 1974; Kulik, Kulik, & Cohen, 1979). There has been essentially no attempt to determine how much more it costs in terms of salaries for faculty and teaching assistants, or other institutional resources to obtain this advantage.

Given the twin themes of public accountability and cost containment, future research on the impact of college will not be able to avoid coming to terms with issues of cost effectiveness. Examination of benefits in relation to costs will be particularly important for college impact research designed to inform policy. Higher education researchers will be expected to answer not only the question "Is it (this intervention or program) effective?", but also "How much does it cost to be effective?" Such studies will entail an added complexity when interpreting the evidence. For example, what might one conclude from a study which finds that a particular instructional approach leads to a 10% advantage or improvement in student learning but costs 15% more to implement than traditional methods? Cost-benefit questions clearly throw a wild card into the mix and make the research world a little less tidy, but they cannot be ignored.

Behrman, Rosenzweig, and Taubman (1995), in a recent study of the economic returns to attendance at different kinds of postsecondary institutions, suggest what can happen when costs are factored into investigations of college impact and how the conclusions may vary from those of studies that consider only benefits. In How College Affects Students, the body of research we reviewed on the economic returns to attending different kinds of institutions focused almost exclusively on the benefits, in terms of additional earnings, attributable to institutional characteristics. The Behrman, Rosenzweig, and Taubman research not only describes the benefits but does so in terms of the incremental lifetime advantage in earnings minus the differential tuition costs of attending different kinds of colleges. They found that, with background factors held constant, women attending a selective private college such as Wellesley had a lifetime earnings advantage of about $60,000 over women attending a flagship public university such as the University of Michigan. However, the earnings differential turned out to be [End Page 158] only slightly more than the four-year tuition differential. Thus, taking into account costs as well as benefits gives one a different perspective on the status allocating potential of different types of postsecondary institutions.

The Behrman, Rosenzweig, and Taubman (1995) study, of course, is a somewhat simplified example in that both benefits and costs are expressed in terms of dollars. It does, however, underscore the possibility that the conclusions reached from studies of college impact that take costs as well as benefits into account may be substantially different from those of studies that merely consider relative benefits.

Technology: Changing the Face of Teaching and Learning

Shifts identified earlier in the profile of the undergraduate student body and in the economic and political climate in which higher education finds itself are accompanied by a rapidly emerging and expanding array of computer and information technologies. These new technologies have significantly enlarged the range of options for creating teaching-learning settings. In the minds of many public officials and higher education administrators, the new technologies promise both increased responsiveness to higher education's changing clientele and relief from budgetary pressures. The vehicles of this new responsiveness and relief, however, are also forcing shifts in conventional beliefs about how, when, and where students learn and instruction is delivered. Perhaps the most revolutionary consequence of these demographic, economic, and technological changes has been the necessary reconsideration and redefinition of conventional understandings of faculty and student roles and responsibilities in the teaching and learning process, as well as shifts in the ways students and faculty interact both in and out of the classroom.

Based on a broadening understanding of how students learn (e.g., Gardner, 1983) and substantial evidence that active student involvement is a central dynamic in student learning and development (e.g., Astin, 1993; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991), educators believe the new technologies offer opportunities to expand access to higher education, to respond to diverse student learning styles, to provide vehicles for active student involvement, and to reduce costs. Conventional classroom instructional methods are being augmented or replaced by multimedia presentations (e.g., computer-based simulations, CD-ROM materials, the World Wide Web, electronic mail, video tapes, and commercial courseware). The new technologies, however, are doing far more than simply jazzing up the delivery of conventional lectures or lab demonstrations. Indeed, it is no longer necessary for instructors and students to be in the same location at the same time for teaching and learning to occur. (This characteristic has, of course, been true of correspondence [End Page 159] and taped television courses for some time, but there the similarity ends.) Various new teaching and learning technologies have made possible the "anywhere, anytime" delivery of instruction and student learning. The World Wide Web, gophers, file-transfer protocols, listservs, and bulletin boards, as well as more structured forms of distance education (e.g., audio- and teleconferencing, computer conferencing), taken together, constitute a far richer array of flexible instructional approaches than has existed at any time in the past. This array affords highly varied learning opportunities to both traditional students and learners previously denied access to higher education or advanced training because of geographic location or schedule. Many believe that these technologies not only provide wider access to higher education but that they will also increase instructional effectiveness (through their greater flexibility to accommodate varying learning styles) and instructional productivity (through reduced costs and increased numbers of learners served).

The effectiveness of these varied and new instructional approaches constitutes, in our view, a major, generic field of inquiry. The obvious substantive questions are: "Do they work? Are they better than traditional methods of instruction?" The real question, of course, is more complex: "Which methods work best, for whom, under what conditions, and for what content and skill areas?" Kozma (1991), for example, concluded from his review of the research on various instructional media that the capabilities of any given medium interact in complex ways with the instructional method used, the learning task, and students' learning style.

Similarly, as suggested earlier, however, the question is not simply one of effectiveness, but effectiveness at what cost? The latter question is particularly salient for policy makers and others who believe the new technologies will increase student access to higher education, be more educationally effective, and accomplish both of those goals at a cost below that of traditional instruction.

To date, the indicator of "instructional effectiveness" has been narrowly defined. Most of what is known about the effectiveness of these innovative instructional tools and methods comes from studies of students' grade- performance. Substantially less is known about the effectiveness of informa-tion technology-based courses on other learning outcomes (e.g., develop-ment of higher-order cognitive skills or learning-related attitudes and values). Moreover, as suggested earlier, the instructional medium probably interacts in complex ways with instructional method, the learning task, instructional content, and the student. All of these issues and questions are important from both an educational and policy perspective. All are empirical questions, but ones that remain unexamined or unanswered.

The rapidly increasing interest in various forms of distance education highlights the importance of another area for future research. The central [End Page 160] link between student learning and student-faculty and student-student interactions both inside and outside the formal classroom is well established (e.g., Astin, 1993; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). Virtually without exception, however, this body of evidence is based on studies of the experiences and encounters among students and faculty on traditional campuses. At present, one can only speculate about how various approaches to distance education may alter the frequency, nature, and dynamics of such interactions, as well as what the educational consequences of any such alterations might be. The image of Mark Hopkins on one end of the log teaching a student on the other end is an abiding, if quaint, metaphor in higher education; but the new forms of distance education challenge virtually every dimension of that image. How critical to teaching and learning is face-to-face student-faculty contact in the same location? Can the educational effects of such student-faculty interaction be achieved in cyberspace? Is such contact fundamental to effective teaching and learning, or is it, in itself, just a different "medium of instruction"?

The new information technologies in both the traditional classroom and in distance education present new methodological, as well as substantive, challenges to research on college students in the 21st century. We earlier identified some of the challenges of doing research on part-time, commuting, and adult students. Those problems are likely to be particularly troublesome in studying the effectiveness of distance education inasmuch as the primary audience for distance education is expected to be part-time and adult students who do their coursework in their homes, at other remote sites, or both.

Obtaining access to these learners and securing their continued participation in a study are only two of the problems scholars will face. Other challenges will include developing data collection designs that produce response rates comparable to those of present survey- and classroom-based collection plans. Use of classic experimental and quasi-experimental designs may be problematic to the extent that courses offered at a distance are not also being offered simultaneously in traditional settings. What will be the comparison group? When instruction is delivered to multiple sites, the homogeneity of those settings (as well as the control/comparison setting) may be substantial.

Other methodological challenges arise from the sheer number and diversity of information technology-based instructional approaches. The number of such instructional media is further complicated by the fact that multiple forms are often used in the same course. The possible combinations and permutations are staggering. Add to this picture the fact that the technologies themselves are changing as current ones are enhanced or become obsolete and new ones, unthought of three years (or months) ago, emerge. The range and volatility of instructional information technologies [End Page 161] not only present serious research design problems, they may also produce a fragmentation that will put knowledge development itself at risk of bogging down in a flood of studies based on single courses, single learning settings (let alone single institutions) which have few characteristics in common whether in their independent or dependent variables.

Conclusions

The theme for this special issue of The Review of Higher Education asks "Is American Higher Education Facing Revolutionary Change in the Coming Decade?" While "the best of times, . . . [and] the worst of times" portrayed by Mr. Dickens had life-and-death implications for the people of London and Paris, no lives are at stake in the future of the study of college effects on students. Nonetheless, the demographic, institutional, economic, and technological changes that will reshape the study of college impacts on students over the next decade may well be "revolutionary." Still, if it is a revolution, it is a quiet one. If it is a "crisis," it is a creative one.

The study of college's effects on students, virtually since the beginning, has rested on assumed homogeneity in three areas. First, college effects studies have assumed homogeneity in the students being studied. Our review for How College Affects Students makes transparently clear that the exploration of general effects--educational interventions or experiences that have the same effect for all students--has been the dominant goal of all but a handful of investigations. Studies of conditional effects--how interventions or experiences may have a differential effect depending on the characteristics of the student or institution attended--have been scarce. Until the late 1960s or early 1970s, when higher education shifted from meritocratic to egalitarian admissions policies, the assumption of homogeneity among students may have been generally warranted. Such an assumption is no longer supportable, however, and demographic projections for the next decade or two suggest that the heterogeneity of the undergraduate student body will increase even further. It is a condition that can no longer be ignored in the study of college effects.

Second, college impact research to date has also assumed a general homogeneity in the educational process. This assumption is reflected in beliefs and practices relating to effective instructional methods (lecturing, for example, has been the overwhelming method of choice for teaching students), educational settings (e.g., a campus--usually residential, classroom, or laboratory), and the academic delivery cycle (the academic calendar, the number and length of class sessions, the number of credits needed for program or degree completion, and so on). Current, emerging, and as-yet-undreamed-of information technologies are forcing serious reconsideration of our assumptions of how, when, and where instruction (and education [End Page 162] more broadly) can be delivered and learning promoted. The research questions, designs, and methodologies on which we have relied in the past will not be adequate in the future. We must look to adapt them to the changing conditions and to develop new designs and methods.

Third, higher education scholars (and others) have assumed homogeneity in the level of support the public is willing to provide colleges and universities. Until relatively recently, that assumption was probably well grounded. In the 1970s, however, the public's willingness to provide unquestioning financial support (whether in the form of tuition payments or state appropriations) began to wane, and it has continued to do so since that time. Economic pressures and demands for accountability have put the higher education research community on the firing line in important public debates about a wide variety of issues, including affirmative action, educational equity, occupational opportunities, public vs. private benefits, and obligations to "pay" for higher education. Researchers studying college impacts and the higher education research community as a whole have an opportunity to contribute to the informed resolutions of those debates. The inability or unwillingness to make those contributions means risking continued support for the research we do.

These are neither the best nor the worst of times. They are, we believe, revolutionary times, times of great challenge and opportunity. If scholars of college impact (new and emerging) are unable to adapt successfully, then the future of research in this area is not bright. If we can respond appropriately, however, then (with apologies to Mr. Dickens, Sydney Carton, and the reader) it will be far, far better research we do than we have ever done before.

Ernest T. Pascarella is the Mary Louise Petersen Professor of Higher Education at the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the impact of college on students. Patrick T. Terenzini is Professor and Senior Scientist in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are in the impact of college on students and issues in assessing student educational outcomes.

References

Aper, J., & Hinkle, D. (1991). State policies for assessing student outcomes: A case study with implications for state and institutional authorities. Journal of Higher Education, 62, 539-555.

Astin, A. (1977). Four critical years. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Astin, A. (1993). What matters in college? Four Critical Years revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Astin, A., & Panos, R. (1969). The educational and vocational development of college students. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

Behrman, J., Rosenzweig, M., & Taubman, P. (1995, December). College choice and wages: Estimates using data on female twins. Paper presented at the NSF/REStat Conference on School Quality and Educational Outcomes, Cambridge, MA.

Chickering, A., & Reisser, L. (1993). Education and identity (2d Ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Almanac Issue. (1995, September 1). 42(1).

Chronicle of Higher Education: Almanac Issue. (1996, September 2), 43(1).

Dougherty, K. (1994). The contradictory college. Albany: SUNY Press.

Durham, R., Hays, J., & Martinez, R. (1994). Socio-cognitive development among Chicano and Anglo American college students. Journal of College Student Development, 35, 178-182.

Ewell, P. (1991, November/December). Back to the future. Change, 12-17.

Feldman, K., and Newcomb, T. (1969). The impact of college on students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic.

Hodgkinson, H. L. (1985). All one system: Demographics of education--kindergarten through graduate school. Washington, DC: Institute for Educational Leadership.

Knox, W., Lindsay, P., & Kolb, M. (1993). Does college make a difference? Westport, CT : Greenwood Press.

Kozma, R. B. (1991). Learning with media. Review of Educational Research, 61, 179-211.

Kuh, G., Douglas, K. B., Lund, J., & Ramin-Gyurnek, J. (1994). Student learning outside the classroom: Transcending artificial boundaries. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 8. Washington, DC: George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.

Kuh, G., Schuh, J., Whitt, E., & Associates. (1991). Involving colleges. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kulik, J., Kulik, C., & Carmichael, K. (1974). The Keller plan in science teaching. Science, 83, 379-383.

Kulik, J., Kulik, C., & Cohen, P. (1979). A meta-analysis of outcome studies of Keller's Personalized System of Instruction. American Psychologist, 34, 307-318.

Levine, A., & Associates. (1989). Shaping higher education's future: Demographic realities and opportunities, 1990-2000. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

National Center for Education Statistics. (1994). Digest of education statistics, 1994. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. (NCES 94-115)

Pascarella, E. (1997). It's time we started paying attention to community college students. About Campus, 1(6), 14-17.

Pascarella, E., Bohr, L., Nora, A., Ranganathan, S., Desler, M., & Bulakowski, C. (1994). Impacts of 2-year and 4-year colleges on learning orientations: A preliminary study. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 18, 577-589.

Pascarella, E., Bohr, L., Nora, A., & Terenzini, P. (1995a). Cognitive effects of two-year and four-year colleges: New evidence. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 17, 83-96.

Pascarella, E., Bohr, L., Nora, A., & Terenzini, P. (1995b). Intercollegiate athletic participation and freshman-year cognitive outcomes. Journal of Higher Education, 66, 369-387.

Pascarella, E., Edison, M., Nora, A., Hagedorn, L., & Terenzini, P. (1995-1996). Cognitive effects of community colleges and four-year colleges. Community College Journal, 66, 35-39.

Pascarella, E., Edison, M., Hagedorn, L., Nora, A., & Terenzini, P. (1996a). Influences on students' internal locus of attribution for academic success in the first year of college. Research in Higher Education, 37, 731-756.

Pascarella, E., Edison, M., Hagedorn, L., Nora, A., & Terenzini, P. (1996b). Influences on students' openness to diversity and challenge in the first year of college. Journal of Higher Education, 67, 174-195.

Pascarella, E., Edison, M., Whitt, E., Nora, A., Hagedorn, L., & Terenzini, P. (1996). Cognitive effects of Greek affiliation during the first year of college. NASPA Journal, 33, 242-259.

Pascarella, E. & Terenzini, P. (1991). How college affects students: Findings and insights from twenty years of research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Smart, J., & Ethington, C. (1985). Early career outcomes of baccalaureate recipients: A study of native four-year and transfer two-year college students. Research in Higher Education, 22, 185-193.

Stage, F. (1993). Chanting the names of the ancestors. Educational Researcher, 22(6), 22-24.

Terenzini, P. (1996). Rediscovering roots: Public policy and higher education research. Review of Higher Education, 20, 5-13.

Terenzini, P., Springer, L., Yeager, P., Pascarella, E., & Nora, A. (1996). First-generation college students: Characteristics, experiences, and cognitive development. Research in Higher Education, 37, 1-22.

Whitaker, D., & Pascarella, E. (1994). Two-year college attendance and socioeconomic attainment: Some additional evidence. Journal of Higher Education, 65, 194-210.

[an error occurred while processing this directive].