Where Do We Go from Here?: Implications for Researchers of How College Affects Students

364 Spring 1992 volume 15, no. 3 W h ere D o W e G o from H ere? Im p licatio n s for R e s e a r c h e r s of How College Affects Students L eo n a rd L. B aird Ihave been given the extremely unusual opportunity to review a book twice. I read How College Affects Students in draft as a manu­ script reviewer for Jossey-Bass and now have been asked to consider it again—though for different reasons—for the Review of Higher Education. Reading the book again and looking over my earlier editorial reactions, I found little to change, except, perhaps, to in­ crease my estimation of the volume. I had had complete confidence that How College Affects Students would be a significant book on higher education. Now I think it will probably be the significant book for years to come. The scholarship is impeccable, the analyses incisive, and the judgments thoughtful. However, my purpose in this article is not to once again review and consequently praise the book in the usual sense. Rather, the volume presents us with the occasion to consider what we have learned in the twenty years since the appearance of Feldman and Newcomb's The Impact of College on Students (1969) and to reflect on what we still need to know. My position is that we have made major advances in many areas but that research on the impact of college has not yet reached full maturity. I will return to this evaluation after first reviewing the heart of Pascarella and Terenzini's contri­ bution—casting their summaries as the answers to six queries. T he Core of W hat W e Have Learned: A sking the R ight Q uestions What have we learned in the twenty years and thousands of research studies reviewed by Pascarella and Terenzini? Most impor­ tantly, as they competently summarize, we have learned to use a variety of sophisticated research methodologies, in particular, how to construct models that help us understand potentially causal rela­ tionships. Using these models has led to another important realiza­ tion— the variables affecting the phenomena we study are extremely complex. Our understanding of retention, academic performance, and educational aspirations has been matched by the variety of accompanying variables. Simultaneously, as our explanatory mod­ els become more sophisticated to capture more of these variables ljeslie, Kuh, & Baird/Review Essay 365 and their interactions, the importance of any single variable dimishes. It is almost true that everything influences everything, but that nothing explains very much. While this complexity appropriately mirrors reality, it makes both conceptualization and action more difficult. And it is here that Pascarella and Terenzini are extremely helpful. For example, simply knowing how to sort out multiple influ­ ences and deal with them is one of the major advances in the work of many researchers, as How College Affects Students shows.1Pascarella and Terenzini's overarching questions not only help to organize the literature but also provide a structure for understanding the levels of possible causation in sorting out the impacts of college. Here are their relevant questions and some implications that follow from them. • Is there any evidence that students attending college change? Answering this question calls for longitudinal evidence, care­ fully defined criteria, assessment methods that will be appropri­ ate at both the beginning and end of college, and designs that deal with such issues as sampling, drop-outs, and self-selection. • What is the evidence that the changes observed actually result from college attendance and not from other factors? This ques­ tion requires longitudinal information from both individuals who attend college and those who do not, which, in turn, re­ quires us to identify the relevant variables that will let us match the two samples meaningfully so we are not comparing apples and oranges. Assuming that this process is statistically possible, we again need to think through the design problems just de­ scribed, which are increased because of the problems in tracking non-college-goers. The evidence from such studies helps us determine whether changes are due to the college experience, maturation, or societal change—and in what degrees...