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  • Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today’s College Student by Arthur Levine, Diane R. Dean
  • Robert D. Reason
Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today’s College Student. Arthur Levine and Diane R. Dean. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013, 227pages, $30.47 (hardcover)

Generation on a tightrope: A portrait of today’s college student is the third installment in Arthur Levine’s series of books aimed at describing contemporary college students. Levine has a knack for employing powerful language to summarize the precarious situations in which contemporary college students find themselves. In 1980, he described the college years as the time when dreams and heroes died; in 1998, writing with Jeanette Cureton, college was the time when hope and fear collide. In 2012, Levine and co‐author Diane Dean suggest that contemporary college students are balancing on a metaphorical tightrope as they struggle to bridge the chasm between their dreams for the future and the economic realities of the world they enter upon graduation from college.

Tightrope, like the first two books, is built upon extensive data collected from multiple sources on multiple campuses. For Tightrope the authors used data from earlier studies that informed the previous books, but also collected new data. Quantitative data were collected in 2008 and 2009 from approximately 2,500 undergraduate students and approximately 160 senior student affairs officers (Actual sample sizes were not provided in the text of the book, but these estimated responses were easily calculated using information provided in Appendix B). As with previous studies, the quantitative data collection was supplemented by extensive qualitative and observational data from 26 institutions.

Tightrope is presented in a logical fashion and its eight chapters cover the major facets of a college student’s life: academics, out‐of‐class interactions, parents/family, multiculturalism, politics, and life after college. Each chapter builds upon the foundation laid in Chapter 1, which foregrounds the main message of the text: higher education institutions must adapt to meet the needs of a changing population of college students. The authors rely on the ubiquity of technology and social media to breathe new life into this rather wellworn conclusion.

The students described in Tightrope bear a striking resemblance to those described in When Hope and Fear Collide. In fact, the collision between hope and fear, of optimism and reality, is just as apt a metaphor for the balancing of dreams and reality as a tightrope walker in the current volume. This is not to say that the findings of the current research are a simple rehashing of the previous findings; although many similarities exist, as one would expect, between the last two generations of college students, the infusion of technology into all aspects of college students’ lives serves as a major focus for the authors. The authors highlight multiple ways in which technology changes the college experience. [End Page 335]

Levine and Dean describe current college students as the “first generation of digital natives to attend college” (p. 20). The authors link ubiquitous technology to how students learn, how they approach the college experience, and how they interact with other students. Levine and Dean’s conclusions support findings of previous research on the role of technology in learning: faculty members will need to incorporate technology into classroom presentations in order to maintain students’ attention, find ways to individualize students’ experiences, and teach students the process of gathering and making judgments about the quality of information rather than simply providing students good‐quality information.

Perhaps of greatest interest to student affairs professionals is the description of how the infusion of technology changes the ways in which students interact on (and beyond) campus. Levine and Cureton (1998) hinted at the changing nature of social interaction in When Hope and Fear Collide, and Levine and Dean further develop this idea in Tightrope. As with many of the changes highlighted in Tightrope, the authors attribute much credit (or blame) for the changes to the infusion of technology. The authors also discuss the rapid increase in the pace of change.

Levine and Dean use the language of “the new tribalism” (p. 68) to describe how students are using technology to create their...

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