The Measured Effects of Higher Education

To produce meaningful results, research on col lege impact must be multi-institutional and longitudinal in de sign. Further, as more and more college-age youth actually enter higher educational institutions, the value of studies of college attendance versus nonattendance decreases, and the value of studies of the comparative effects of different colleges increases. The American Council on Education, through its Cooperative Institutional Research Program, is engaged in carrying out studies of the latter kind; one recent investiga tion is a 1970 follow-up of students who had entered college in 1966. All students typically changed in certain ways during the college years: in their career interests, in their commitment to formal religion, in their day-to-day activities. An indi vidual college may accelerate, retard, or have no impact on these "normal" changes. In addition, certain experiences that only part of the student body of a college undergo—for in stance, living on campus as opposed to living at home—influ enced outcomes in four domains: the cognitive-behavioral, the cognitive-psychological, the affective-behavioral, and the affec tive-psychological. Finally, different types of institutions were found to have different effects on all four domains. These effects were assessed by comparing an institution's actual out put on a given criterion measure with its "expected" output, as calculated from the characteristics of its students at the time they entered college.