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Reviewed by:
  • How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research
  • Nathaniel J. Bray, Ph.D., assistant professor of educational leadership, policy, and technology studies
Ernest T. Pascarella & Patrick T. Terenzini . (2005). How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research. San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons. 827 pages. ISBN 0-7879-1044-9. $55.00.

Pascarella and Terenzini's How College Affects Students, published in 1991, has been a staple of courses on college student development and trends for the past decade. The authors' original effort seeks to encompass empirical studies and the major theoretical approaches that have been used to consider the issue of the impact of colleges on students. Now, they have released a new volume that seeks to update readers on the trends and findings of studies conducted throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the current millennium. As the authors argue in this newest work, the original volume was written on the cusp of a period in which a new and significantly revised set of ground rules and understandings of the effects of colleges on students would be developed. This review, therefore, considers the offerings found in Pascarella and Terenzini's update, How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research, published in 2005.

The overall premise of the book and what it has to offer to the field of general education have not changed since 1991, although the specifics of the content have. Pascarella and Terenzini continue their sweeping and daunting efforts to capture the intricacies of the studies they review, both indicating how these were conducted and providing a reasoned insight into the meaning one can attribute to the results of the studies. Furthermore, the authors have managed to yet again articulate the complexities of the various studies and present them in a meaningful way by utilizing the same conceptual approaches as in their original work. The duplication of sections from the original in the current version makes for easy comparison. Even more helpful in this regard, within each section is a brief synopsis of the findings in the original work followed by new findings in light of the earlier knowledge. [End Page 160]

Pascarella and Terenzini also note changes in focus within strands of research over time. For example, in terms of between-institution effects, there was relatively little research done at the time the original book was released. Since then, however, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of studies on this topic. The authors' acknowledgment of the overarching trends in the research being conducted is particularly important given their argument that most meta-analytic techniques would not have been helpful to condense the data given different operational definitions contained within individual studies. Instead, as in the original volume, Pascarella and Terenzini do not attempt to compute study effect sizes or similarly aggregate the studies (p. 11). As they so concisely note, understanding the size and details of the body of literature becomes important, and they have provided that information so that the reader may consider this along with the findings.

What Pascarella and Terenzini report is a much more complex and informed field of study than existed a decade ago. More variegated and differentiated theories are brought to bear on the ill-defined questions associated with the overall effect of college on students. In most cases, they note, prior knowledge is furthered rather than overturned.

So, with all of this in mind, what does this book offer to those whose focus is on general education? Primarily, the volume can serve as a handy reference, guiding an individual's own pursuit of increased knowledge and helping to inform and target that search. Although the topics of general education, core curricula, and liberal arts do not make the index, Pascarella and Terenzini's book still covers a wealth of information that could be beneficial to scholars and practitioners in this field. For instance, consider their discussion of coursework pattern studies, which can be informative in evaluating student development. The authors discuss several helpful studies and then note that some of the studies are contradictory, leading to "ambiguity about general education coursework" (p. 93). They state strongly, however, that...

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