The value of higher education, and particularly the four-year undergraduate venture influenced from the liberal arts tradition, is largely framed around the impact it has on a broad range of skills and dispositions that serve to enhance human flourishing. Employers and society more broadly can benefit from individuals who are committed to careful…

Over the last decade the number of students studying abroad has increased 150% to more than a quarter of a million. The programs in which these students participate are no longer seen as simply a campus extension of academic exercise, but as an overall educational experience that develops holistic life skills in the participants. Through their…

There is a distinct difference between preventing a problem and promoting students' emotional and intellectual development. Today's schools, with their focus on standards and accountability, frequently use a risk-based problem-prevention approach in both policy and practice to address young people's drug use, delinquency, unsafe sex, violence, and…

Perry's theory of intellectual and ethical development of college students is briefly reviewed. This theory was based on work with Harvard University students, and addresses dualism, multiplicity, and relativism. In the first stage, a student sees the world in right-wrong, black-white terms, with no room in the thinking process for conditional or…

Academic departments exert a powerful influence on students by recruitment of distinctive personality types into academic disciplines, and by a socialization process in which departments reward students for the display of attitudes in accordance with the norms of their disciplines. This study examined the differential patterns of student growth…

The 14 chapters of this book review and synthesize research on the influence of college on students. Chapter 1 provides a detailed discussion of the evolution of research on college outcomes as an area of study, outlines the conceptual framework that guided the review, and provides a general overview of the study. Chapter 2 summarizes the major…