Academic Disciplines: Holland's Theory and the Study of College Students and Faculty (review)

In Academic Disciplines, three distinguished scholars of higher education take the study of college impact to a new level. Grounding their work in the theory of careers developed by John L. Holland (1966, 1997), they present a thorough and convincing empirical study of the effects of academic majors on students during college. Their rationale for the study is described as follows:

Holland's theory is basically a theory of person-environment fit, based on the assumption that there are six personality types and six analogous academic environments and that educational persistence, satisfaction, and achievement of students are functions of the congruence or fit between students and their academic environments. Thus, if one wants to know more about what colleges and universities might do to facilitate the retention, satisfaction, and learning of their students, then one must understand the inherent diversity of academic disciplines and the distinctive academic environments that their respective faculties create .

(p. 2)

After validating the theoretical typology of academic environments empirically for faculty (using data from the 1989 Carnegie study of the American professoriate) and students (using data from the 1986 freshman survey and a 1990 follow-up conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA), the authors set out systematically to test the Holland model. They focus on three underlying assumptions of the Holland model: self-selection—students choose academic environments compatible with their personality types; socialization—academic environments reinforce and reward different talents; and congruence— people flourish in environments congruent with their personality types (pp. 51–54). Longitudinal data from 2,309 students who were enrolled in the same 4-year college in 1986 and 1990 were used in the analysis of change due to Holland environments. Dependent variables in the change analysis were scales reflecting ability and interest in each of four personality orientations: investigative—self-ratings on intellectual self-confidence, academic and mathematical ability, drive to achieve, making a theoretical contribution to science; artistic—self-ratings on artistic and writing ability, becoming accomplished in one of the performing arts, writing original works, creating artistic work, developing a meaningful philosophy of life; social—influencing the political structure, influencing social values, helping others who are in difficulty, becoming involved in programs to clean up the environment, participating in a community action program, helping to promote racial understanding; and enterprising—leadership ability, popularity, social self-confidence, become an authority in my field, obtaining recognition from colleagues for contributions to my special field, having administrative responsibility for the work of others, being very well off financially, being successful in a business of my own, becoming an expert on finance and commerce (pp. 66–67).

All analyses employ appropriate statistical adjustments to control for any underlying problems with the data as well as for relevant student characteristics such as gender. The authors also look at differences in outcomes based on whether students were primary (similar disciplines in both surveys) or secondary (dissimilar discliplines) recruits into their academic majors.

Results generally support the self-selection assumption, but with some gender differences. Both the socialization and congruence assumptions are also supported, but with some differences by gender and major field. The authors conclude the book by discussing the importance of theoretically-based schemes for classifying important dimensions of academic environments as well as for understanding more fully student learning, patterns of change and stability in college students, alternative schemas for curriculum design, and organizational diversity. Overall, the presentations of findings and their implications in Academic Disciplines are far too rich for a brief review to do them justice.

The work reflected in this book serves an important heuristic function, both for the continuing series of related journal articles that these authors have produced and for the recommendations of future research that would extend this particular study through expanding its scope by drawing on other, more sociologically oriented, conceptual frameworks. Recent articles include Feldman et al. (1999...