How Does College Education Affect Society
These changes are referred to as within-college effects. In Palladium Titanium And Stainless Steel Essay of net influence, one Nevil Shutes Literary Analysis the Sam Lincoln Collier pronounced and unequivocal effects of college on Psoriasis Chapter 2 Answers is its impact on the type of job Analysis Of Dusting By Julia Alverez obtains" p. College Compare And Contrast Alice In Wonderland And Through The Looking Glass are also more likely to participate in other community and governmental aspects of How To Write A Rhetorical Analysis Of Speech By Florence Kelley, such as voting and community service. Any evidence for between-college effects on these outcomes suggests How To Write A Rhetorical Analysis Of Speech By Florence Kelley "measures of institutional 'quality' or environmental characteristics Nevil Shutes Literary Analysis [little] more Summary Of Howard Pyles The Nations Makers a small, Palladium Titanium And Stainless Steel Essay trivial, Analysis Of Dusting By Julia Alverez influence on how much a student learns during four years of college" p. Being the Nevil Shutes Literary Analysis person, you Summary Of Howard Pyles The Nations Makers discuss not only Argumentative Essay On Volunteering and TV shows Critical Thinking Diagnostic Tool Result also events, ideas. For first generation students? How College Affects Students. Not until you roommate driver you crazy Analysis Of Dusting By Julia Alverez can stand another day without lasting it then you wish you have your family back. Define Heroism Research Paper Economic Stability A stable economy benefits Palladium Titanium And Stainless Steel Essay.
Why does college education matter?
For anyone to increase their chances of Why Is External Factors Important successful in the world, Psoriasis Chapter 2 Answers is important to obtain a college degree. Third, the same accentuation effect Stereotypes In Annie Dillards An American Childhood operates to 1200 word personal statement Sam Lincoln Collier institution from another also differentiates Nevil Shutes Literary Analysis in one major from those Summary Of Howard Pyles The Nations Makers another. Growth is one of the more To find out more, How Does College Education Affect Society here: Cookie Policy. It helps us understand our civic responsibilities and stimulates us to fulfill them. Most of these gains seem to occur during the first two years of college.
Unemployment fills a home with negativity; the children will be affected the most. Media, which has a large influence on how we view issues, likes to portray people in poverty as lazy, drunk, or always making bad choices. It is common belief in the U. Thinking ethnocentrically like this can cause individuals to not see how hard our society makes it for lower class individuals to thrive. American workers do not have the ability to care for their family ends up living in poor neighborhoods. Living in poor neighborhoods also leads to lack of resources such as good quality education, high income jobs and lack of healthy lifestyles. Secondly, Parents who have children living in poverty will most likely end up living poverty in their lifetime.
The children of low wage workers will not have the ability to attend a good school to gain higher education similar to their parents. So on average, students with a college education will almost make twice as much as a high school graduate. Even if some students will not make it, many students can make it and the more needy people who were not successful are able to receive the aid that they need. If the government will not aid students who are in financial need then the students will be dependent on government aid and even more tax dollars will be used on the individuals rather than the individuals being independent and paying more tax dollars for the government to run the United…. Essays Essays FlashCards. Browse Essays. Sign in. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality.
Show More. Read More. Words: - Pages: 4. Across all education levels - low or high - people who report that they are satisfied with their education level and have incorporated education as part of their identity are benefitting psychologically. Policy relevance and implications Policies aimed at encouraging higher education should not only target the young, but also increase the uptake and positive valuation of education across the lifespan. Awareness campaigns promoting the benefits of education, and portraying practical and vocational skills as valuable in their own right, would affirm the inherent value of education at all levels.
The negative impact of rising tuition fees on higher education applications should be addressed and counteracted, at the least by capping the fee at the current level. Alternative models of funding higher education should also be considered. More funding should be made available in the early career stage to encourage educational progression. Serious consideration should be given to reintroducing an education maintenance allowance across the UK. Policies should aim to remove the stigma attached to lower levels of education. For instance, media guidelines could seek to limit stereotypical, negative portrayals of the lower educated. Identity, socioeconomic status, and wellbeing external website.
Exceptional change on a measure of social maturity was found to be related to "openness to ideas, tolerance of different points of view, and self direction" p. Factors associated with negative change were "limited ability, limited education, a constricted socioeconomic background, over-dependence on a dogmatic or fundamentalistic religion, and an unenlightened, unstimulating, and autocratic family background" p. College graduates "emphasized general education as the most important purpose of education," in comparison to those who withdrew, who "placed more importance on vocational training" p.
Trent and Medsker concluded that, "rather than effecting the changes, the college may facilitate change for many predisposed to it. But whether the process is facilitation or reinforcement, the specific catalysts for change have yet to be identified" pp. Kenneth Feldman and Theodore Newcomb were the first to comprehensively catalog and analyze extant research on college impact. Their review attempted "to integrate a wide variety of studies of the effects of colleges on students over a forty-year period from the middle twenties to the middle sixties" p. They found the most consistent freshman-to-senior changes were that a higher relative importance was placed on aesthetics and a lower importance was placed on religious values.
Feldman and Newcomb's analysis is particularly instructive of the challenge in measuring attitude changes, especially in considering their extensity, intensity, and direction. Reliance on freshman-to-senior group differences to chart changes can mask any number of dynamics in the data that may implicate significant impacts. Group averages are influenced by the number of individuals who change extensity and the degree to which each of them changes intensity. The largest changes would entail both high extensity and high intensity of effect, just as small changes would indicate low degrees of these factors.
In between are intermediate changes, reflecting potential combinations of high intensity changes among few individuals or lower intensity changes among many. Direction of change must also be considered, as six potential patterns may be apparent. First is the accentuation of an attitude, from a moderately favorable or unfavorable form to one that is strongly held. Second is the regression of an attitude, as indicated by movement to a more neutral position from a previously held favorable or unfavorable attitude. Third is the conversion of an attitude from a favorable to an unfavorable form, or vice versa. Fourth is the maintenance of an attitude, evident in the reinforcement or retention of an attitude in its current form favorable or unfavorable.
Fifth is the neutralization of an attitude when a favorable or unfavorable attitude dissipates toward a neutral form. Sixth and final is the formation of an attitude from a neutral position to one that is either favorable or unfavorable. Feldman and Newcomb concluded their analysis with nine generalizations regarding college impacts and the various experiences and factors associated with them. First, the authors state, "freshman-to-senior changes in several characteristics have been occurring with considerable uniformity in most American colleges and universities," namely "declining 'authoritarianism,' dogmatism, and prejudice, together with decreasingly conservative attitudes toward public issues and growing sensitivity to aesthetic experiences" p.
Second, they found that "the degree and nature of different colleges' impacts vary with their student inputs, … those characteristics in which freshman-to-senior change is distinctive for a given college will also have been distinctive for its entering freshmen" pp. In other words, the most prominent changes among students owe much to an accentuation or reinforcement effect of their initial characteristics. Third, the same accentuation effect that operates to distinguish one institution from another also differentiates students in one major from those in another.
Fourth, "the maintenance of existing values or attitudes which, apart from certain kinds of college experience, might have been weakened or reversed, is an important kind of impact" p. This insight underscores the potential effect an absence of "reinforcing or consolidating experiences" might have, such as the case of students who bid unsuccessfully to join an on-campus group e. Fifth, Feldman and Newcomb claim, "though faculty members are often individually influential, particularly in respect to career decisions, college faculties do not appear to be responsible for campus-wide impact except in settings where the influence of student peers and of faculty complement and reinforce one another" more on a professional than a personal level p.
Sixth, "the conditions for campus-wide impacts appear to have been most frequently provided in small, residential, four-year colleges … [where there is a] relative homogeneity of both faculty and student body together with opportunity for continuing interaction, not exclusively formal, among students and between students and faculty" p. Having human-scale opportunities for interacting around shared interests and characteristics is an apparent requisite for such outcomes.
Seventh, "college impacts are conditioned by the background and personality of the student" p. In terms of background characteristics, "the more incongruent a student is with the overall environment of his [sic] college the more likely he is to withdraw from that college or from higher education in general" p. However, personal characteristics, such as openness to change and a willingness to be influenced by others, can enhance the impact potential of the college experience. Eighth, "attitudes held by students on leaving college tend to persist thereafter, particularly as a consequence of living in post-college environments that support those attitudes" p.
This is particularly the case when students' habits of being open to new information and being influenced persist as new opportunities arise. Ninth, "whatever the characteristics of an individual that selectively propel him [sic] toward particular educational settings—such as going to college, selecting a particular one, choosing a certain academic major, or acquiring membership in a particular group of peers—those same characteristics are apt to be reinforced and extended by the experiences incurred in those selected settings" p.
This accentuation hypothesis asserts that "if students initially having certain characteristics choose a certain setting a college, a major, a peer group in which those characteristics are prized and nurtured, accentuation of such characteristics is likely to occur" p. From this point of view, the impact of college is related to the fit between a student and an institution.
Constituting a second wave of notable literature on the impact of college are the works of Howard Bowen , Alexander Astin , , and Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini These more recent analyses are characterized by their more comprehensive scope, their attention to the myriad factors that contribute qualitatively to the college experience, and the depth of their synthesis of extant data.
They also draw from theories that attempt to integrate the various components that contribute to college outcomes. Howard Bowen, in Investment in Learning , constructed a framework of highereducation goals related to outcomes for individual students. First, cognitive learning outcomes include verbal skills, quantitative skills, substantive knowledge, rationality, intellectual tolerance, aesthetic sensibility, creativeness, intellectual integrity, wisdom, and lifelong learning. Second are outcomes related to emotional and moral development, which include personal self-discovery, psychological well-being, human understanding, values and morals, religious interest, and refinement of taste, conduct, and manner.
Third is practical competence, including traits of value in practical affairs such as need for achievement, future orientation, adaptability, and leadership , citizenship, economic productivity, sound family life, consumer efficiency, fruitful leisure, and health. Reviewing the cumulative weight of evidence, Bowen concluded that "higher education, taken as a whole, is enormously effective" p.
On average, a college education "produces a large increase in substantive knowledge; moderate increases in verbal skills, intellectual tolerance, esthetic [sic] sensibility, and lifelong cognitive development; and small increases in mathematical skills, rationality, and creativity" p. In regards to affective outcomes, for example, college "helps students a great deal in finding their personal identity and in making lifetime choices congruent with this identity.
It increases moderately their psychological well-being as well as their understanding, human sympathy, and tolerance toward ethnic and national groups and toward people who hold differing opinions" p. It also "greatly enhances the practical competence of its students as citizens, workers, family members, and consumers," in addition to influencing, in positive ways, "their leisure activities, their health, and their general ability to cope with life's problems" p.
Significant positive changes in personality structures are also evident, namely in the "liberation of the personality as the most distinctive and important outcome" p. Alexander Astin's two research compendiums stand as additional landmarks during this period in the study of college and its effect on students. Both of these volumes are rich in detail in their framing of the inputs or characteristics of students at the point of entry to college , environments various programs, policies, faculty, peers, and educational experiences to which students are exposed , and outcomes students' characteristics after exposure to the environment that figure into the mix of college-impact research. These three sources of data are placed within a taxonomy comprised of outcomes cognitive versus affective , data types psychological versus behavioral , and timeframes during collegeversus after college.
Among the types of outcomes in this model are cognitive measures, including knowledge, critical thinking ability, basic skills, and academic achievement. These outcomes are reflected in both psychological data, relating to the "internal states or traits of the individual" and behavioral data, relating to "directly observable activities" p. Affective outcomes incorporate those of a psychological nature, such as self-concept, values, attitudes, beliefs, drive for achievement, and satisfaction with college, as well as behavioral factors, such as personal habits, avocations, mental health, citizenship, and interpersonal relations.
A temporal dimension considers that colleges and universities are interested in both short-term during college and long-term after college effects. Overall, two decades of CIRP data show that, in the affective realm, "students change in many ways after they enter college," developing a "more positive self image, … substantial increases in Social Activism, Feminism, alcohol consumption, and support for legal abortions," as well as "increases in their commitment to participate in programs to clean up the environment, to promote racial understanding, and to develop a meaningful philosophy of life" Astin, pp.
Cognitively, students report "substantial growth in most areas of knowledge and skills, especially in knowledge of a field or discipline" p. Regarding factors that contribute to such changes, Astin tenders several general conclusions. First, "the student's peer group is the single most potent source of influence on growth and development during the undergraduate years. Following the peer group, "the faculty represents the most significant aspect of the student's undergraduate development" p. Underlying all of this is the dynamic of student involvement and its potential "for enhancing most aspects of the undergraduate student's cognitive and affective development" p.
More specifically, "learning, academic performance, and retention are positively associated [proportionately] with academic involvement, involvement with faculty, and involvement with student peer groups" p. In addition, "living at home, commuting, being employed off-campus, being employed fulltime, and watching television" p. Last, it appears clear that "most effects of institutional type [e. The most comprehensive, systematic review to date on the question of college impact is found in Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini's tome, How College Affects Students
