How College Affects Students

Transcript

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hello it's Wednesday the 4th of April 2018 at one o'clock Eastern Time and this is student affairs live the online learning community for student affairs educators in higher education I'm your host Heather Shea broadcasting live from Michigan State University my

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pronouns are she her and hers in a moment I will introduce the five panelists joining me today to talk about the newest volume of the book how college affects students but before I do that I need to give a quick thanks to those who make these free webcast possible today's episode is sponsored by

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a CPA college student educators international support for students airs live is one of the many ways a CPA provides innovative professional development visit my Appa org to discover other opportunities including the upcoming student affairs assessment

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Institute sponsored by the Commission for assessment and evaluation this year's Institute held in Chicago Illinois from June 20th through the 22nd provides a guided curricular experience where participants can develop essential assessment knowledge and skills for

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university admission M donors mythbusting enrollment marketing research uncovers the best market channels and communication preferences that have the biggest influence on prospective student perceptions of your institution um stoners white paper is available for

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on-demand download and you can get your copy today and identify what encourages prospective students to apply to your institution we're tweeting out a link shortly now on with today's episode so I'm thrilled to be joined by the five co-authors of the newest volume of how

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college affect students we who work in soon Affairs in higher education faced intense scrutiny on several fronts and in our roles we must have working knowledge of college impact and the metrics that prove what we do matters initially compiled by earnest Passarella

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and Patrick arancini book how college affects students has long been the reference for educators administrators researchers and policymakers and today we're going to be talking specifically about the findings from 2002 to 2013 which builds upon decades of research so

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I'd like to welcome the five authors dr. Matthew Mayhew from the Ohio State University dr.

Alissa Rokenbok from North Carolina State University dr. Nicholas Bowman from the University of Iowa dr.

Tricia Seyfert from Montana State University and dr. Gregory wolniak

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from New York University thank you all for being here today and as each of you give us a little bit more of an introduction besides working on this book what else would you like to share about your work scholarship and interest and then if you like presumably each of

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you also have your own complex story of the many ways college affected you and led to your career so if there's one thing in the book that resonated with your own experience I'd love to hear about that as well so Matt we're gonna we're gonna start with you today welcome

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thank you so much Heather and thank you for organizing this wonderful opportunity to see you today on behalf of a book where the five of us really poured our heart into for about five years and expressed oftentimes our frustrations with the

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writing effort through tears so it's nice to come together in a joyful moment to talk to you about some of the findings from the book as Heather mentioned my name is Matt Mayhew a professor at the Ohio State University I studied college and its effects on

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students more specifically how institutional conditions and educational practices influenced a variety of student learning and democratic outcomes such as interfaith learning and innovation capacities financial wellness those are some of the areas recently

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that I've been diving into when Heather asked for a personal anecdote I got a little worried because you know as faculty we can talk about ourselves a whole lot I will say this from college I was a resident advisor and I remember the importance and the power of having

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very good experiences with staff and the educators around me in teaching me the things that I didn't necessarily learn in the classroom and those lessons about leadership about who I was in the context of being a leader became really important and paramount for me as I was

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thinking about my future career trajectories before I pass it on my pronouns I go by he and hers thanks thanks thanks Matt yeah co-curricular experiences I imagine will be a common theme among many of us and certainly that's my story as well having been an

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RA Alyssa welcome thank you so much Heather my name is Alyssa Rokenbok and I'm a professor of higher education at NC State University and broadly speaking my areas of interest have to do with the

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college student experience and college impact but kind of within that broader domain I'm very interested in looking at college students religious and spiritual experiences and how aspects of campus climate shape some of that development

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that we see among our students I'm also very interested in campus equity issues particularly in terms of gender equity and LGBT equity on campus Matt and I work together on a project called the Interfaith diversity experiences and

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attitudes longitudinal survey or ideals in terms of my teaching I teach quantitative research methods at NC State College student outcomes and courses on spirituality and higher education and gender issues and my

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pronouns are she her and hers in terms of an anecdote I was I was thinking about my years in college I was a psychology major and in in exploring psychological issues I I really was

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seeking a way to kind of apply the theory that I was learning and make it useful and I was really interested in students kind of personal development kind of emerging adulthood issues around identity and it was really serendipitous

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that I I got to know a faculty member who was directing the student affairs program at my college and though I knew very little at the time about social science research being only a junior she invited me to be a part of her graduate

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research team and that was such a wonderful experience for me that and it actually led to my first opportunity to present at a conference at NASPA and so being a part of that project I think really resonates with some of what we

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find in the book that having mentors who inspire you who believe in you and having undergraduate research experiences can help lead to your career choices your Graduate research and other common theme

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Trisha welcome thank you I'm an associate professor at Montana State University in the adult higher education program and currently I also serve as the department head of education my

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research interests largely are also in this College impact domain and I'm looking at the relationship between College and organizational structures and cultures and how those supports student success so I have a project called the supporting student success

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study a multi-institutional study across Canada that looks at faculty members and staff members perceptions of their institutions retention efforts I've also started to really look at how we help first-year students and those who are in high

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school learn the hidden curriculum before they even arrive on our campus and I'm doing some work with games board games and virtual games to help demystify the hidden curriculum before students matriculate on our campuses I think when I I think like everyone I had

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so many rich experiences as a college student myself I was the president of our student government and as such had an opportunity to go to NASA as an undergraduate student and even though I was there it didn't fully hit me that this was a profession that this was a

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field of study that I could make an entire career out of and so it makes me wonder how do we as mentors continuously clearly communicate that if this is the kind of work you're interested in there's a lifetime in a career of opportunities ahead thank you so much to

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our chef Nick welcome thanks for having me I'm Nick Bowman my pronouns are he/him in his I teach in the higher education student affairs program here at the University of Iowa of course I teach include the college student the impact of college and

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students survey research and design and teaching and learning in higher education um in general my research uses some my social psychology training I have half my PhD is in social psych so I study a whole bunch of stuff including issues of college diversity Student

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Success Kuantan research methods college rankings and college admissions uh my experiences actually in getting into this actually overlap a fair bit with Elissa's I was also a psych major as an undergrad as well as an education minor um and I was fortunate enough to be able

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to have some pretty decent both research experiences and teaching experiences and wanted you know a way you know given that I liked both of those things you know knowing that a faculty career was the direction to go I also similarly you I liked the psychology side but at the same time

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wanted to be able to apply that um just on real-world setting and thinking about college students and how they enter and succeed online learning college is the way that turned that Thanks thanks for being here Dec good

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yeah thanks another so it's a pleasure to share the stage or the webcast in this case with this group going last is always difficult because it's such a you know impressive store as we hear and great group but anyway I'll do my best I'm Craig wolniak I work at NYU where I

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direct the Center for Research on higher education outcomes I'm also a faculty member in the higher education and student affairs program broadly speaking my research really delves into the socio-economic impacts of higher education and the way I can

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focus my my research attention within that fairly large domain isn't trying to understand points of transition so factors that influence students as they transition into the system things like attitudes aspirations understanding of financial a financial

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literacy how institutions communicate costs and financial information back to students and then on the other side transitions out how experiences and forms of engagement within the college environment influence students careers and economic trajectories so that's

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really where my research focuses and has for many years my teaching kind of runs the spectrum from kind of topical classes around economics and finance of higher education and enrollment management to really broad classes related to just the basics of research design to the impacts of college on

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students on a personal note you know it's really hard not to think of your own experience as you're working your way through these 700 plus pages for me just briefly I had two big concerns or motivations when I was in college one was I'm happy to say truly was academics

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I actually cared about learning and figuring out what was the right major for me the second was athletics I attended at one of these big Division one state universities many cases I cared as much

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if not more about academic or athletic performance as I did about academic performance but are the two really strong motivators so similar to all the others here on the panel I really had this blended kind of dual purpose or sources of motivation

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that drove my own development of self-concept whether it's academically socially and occasionally in like leadership opportunities so many similar things which I think will bode as we speak further about this and and

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certainly apply to our audience today assuming however that our audiences is familiar with the book but maybe hasn't picked up the latest volume can Tricia can you start by giving our audience an overview of how all different types of

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folks who work in higher ed might use this book and maybe start with first with our audience of students or educators then we'll move on to other absolutely yeah I actually often take this book with me when I'm speaking on campus when I met committee meetings because I

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really think it's the the first place to begin it's the first place I used to begin when I wanted to be research informed and understand what the evidence base suggested in terms of linking a college experience with a desired outcome and so as our student

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affairs divisions are pushed and encouraged to create really well articulated learning outcomes and linking those with experiences I think the book is sort of the beginning place and I often say go read that section and how college affects students if you're

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interested in the effects of a living learning community on cognitive growth and development or student attitudes go see what how college affects student says in terms of the summary and then take those research articles that are referenced and see who's researched and

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cited them since you use a Google Scholar search to see this was published in 2012 who's cited that same article in the last six years and so I think it's the the starting point for really have research informed theory to practice base work and Student Affairs divisions

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great I mentioned some ways that scholars might find other resources but Alyssa as a faculty member what are the ways that other scholars and researchers can use this book in their study I think I think

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similar to what Trisha mentioned this book can be kind of a first place to start so for those who are interested in kind of engaging a new area of research whether they're faculty or students who are working on dissertations I think

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this can be a useful source to kind of get the lay of the land on a particular topic so you know essentially what is it that we know about those issues who might be some of the key players that are conducting research on those topics and importantly what are some of the

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questions that still need to be addressed I think I think that this book tells us a lot about what we know but it also kind of opens the door to what we don't know and what we still need to continue to explore and so I think researchers can use this book to kind of

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build an argument around a new question or problem and use that to kind of build on the work that's come before Craig your area working with policymakers can you talk a little bit about how folks who are shaping policy or seeking to

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understand higher ed policy might refer to this text yeah you know I spent I guess about as much time working in a policy kind of research or applied research organizations as I have been in

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academia and what I noticed from that experience is you know policymakers and applied research oftentimes need to be generalists they need to know a little bit about a lot of things it's kind of different than what we as faculty members do or we go really deep into a kind of a more narrowly defined set of

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topics and so a really echoing both Tricia and Alisa it's it's an incredibly kind of efficiency that you gain from working with this book you might be called upon to put together a quick summary of what for example we know

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about first-year student experiences or programs that seem to help students during their first year of college and you can quickly go to the index and kind of synthesize at least what a handful of good empirical studies have have pointed to in terms of drivers of student success so in that

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it's just an incredible time-saver it drugs efficiency it helps then kind of move the conversation more quickly forward to understanding really worthy evidence lies empirically but even beyond policymakers and some applied

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researchers this book has a lot of meaning for even folks who do high school college counseling or admissions counselors a lot of people care about getting kind of the returns on their investments so to speak making sure that the experience is in fact as good as it

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can be at a particular institution and other not-for-profit agencies that might sponsor college student support programs of any nature there's almost always an evaluation or at least a thoughtful assessment attached to those in this book can inform those efforts as well

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Nick I know while all of you in Chapter one you name the many ways that the four words comprising the title how College affects students have taken on new meaning can you briefly review for us the changes in these base words and how

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that kind of provides some context for the approach of this text I'll start with Nick and then we'll pass it around yeah so we're each going to take a word here um its first of all starting off with how the word how has changed from

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previous volumes um so a lot of the earlier work particularly in volume one which reviewed literature from the 70s and 80s was focused on whether or not College had some sort of impact on students you know and by and large it does in many different ways so as we

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move more toward our volume 3 the focus has become not so much whether but why does it matter and when or for whom does it matter um so focusing you know a little bit more I guess deeply on those aspects of how um another important aspect is that

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there are a lot more theories and frameworks that are proposed for understanding college impact and you know some of these are specific just specific types of outcomes or specific groups of students um so in trying to do this we actually tie the beginning of each of the chapter instead of having

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that as a separate chapter within each chapter we sort of said here the theories frameworks that are most relevant to these particular set of outcomes I found that to be really useful as well but Trisha college the word college what did that mean today well college used to mean

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sort of a program of study at a single point in time for a duration of two to four years depending on the degree one was seeking at a single institution and we know that today that doesn't constitute all that many students because they're attending multiple

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institutions at the same time they're transferring between institutions and so what exactly is college and then we also added in another component that was new in this volume by including scholarship that was conducted in context outside of

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the United States and so College the word college in other contexts means totally different types of institutions whereas in the u.s. we used the word college to refer to both two-year and four-year institutions in Canada where I previously worked colleges were largely

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one-year two-year three-year non degree granting institutions now that's changing some but they're generally credentials of a sub baccalaureate sort and so what is college and who goes to college really has varied over time in

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his context-specific and we so we expand on that in the book excellent perfect how do we how does College affect students what is the one of the ways that that word has changed Alissa so

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what constitutes an effect has really been scrutinized more I think in recent years so as scholars in our field and in other fields have moved toward more experimental types of designs or quasi experimental designs we're really asking

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those questions about can we use that kind of causal language so we have to be really cautious about making those kinds of claims and so we were thoughtful about how to use the word effect or even the word influence and there were times

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depending on the research design where we would use other words we might say this exterior was related to or associated with this particular outcome if it wasn't clear from the design that we could use the terms cause and effect we also used

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developmental language whenever that was warranted so we might say things like this particular educational experience helps students to make cognitive gains and and with the way that we think about effects we also try to keep the focus in the book on college impact so we look

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specifically at relationships between educational experiences and outcomes rather than on other types of relationships for instance the relationship between student characteristics and outcomes or between student characteristics and experiences that students were engaging in so in the

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end we just tried to be really thoughtful about the language to make sure that we were aligning the way that we reported findings with the research design of individual studies Thanks certainly students are very different today Greg do you want to talk about that yeah that's pretty much it that's

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that's the short end of it but it really is where we see the evolving and dynamic nature of the higher education system women outnumber men there's an increased dramatic increase in adult learners in essence it's a more racially culturally

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and religiously diverse student body than we've ever seen historically right so Nick um assessing quality how does how does a study make it into this book talk to us a little bit about your your

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methods there yeah so two parts so the first part of that is how does it make it into the book in the first place um and it's important to note that the literature has really expanded here in the 21st century um so one of several ways that we identified studies in the first place is doing a complex keyword

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search or saying oh well it's got these terms in the title or abstract etc etc so so I created one of these that look during the period of you know our review and then I'm like oh just for fun let me look at what that looks like if we do the same search but look at volume to

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which that review period for volume 2 is actually they included like one more year but at the same time volume three more than twice as many hits for potential studies came up so we said oh wow we need some sort of way of limiting you know to like how do

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we identify the studies that are the most relevant or the most high-quality and so one of the things that we did is we restricted almost exclusively studies that had gone undergone some sort of peer review process there were some exceptions you know in particularly for influential reports and things of that

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sort but that was one of the main criteria that we used in this we considered somewhere we don't have an exact count but probably at least 10,000 different studies for a potential inclusion on and we and our research assistants went through many of these or

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all of these and in terms of ones that we actually ended out citing in the book we included 1848 studies um at least from my end that wasn't necessarily even everything that fit with the chapter there were safer financial aid I mean about seventy-five studies looking at

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financial aid and retention persistence graduation so I didn't cite every single one of those you know just included the ones that you know where either the strongest studies and/or the ones that kind of shed particular insight into kind of how and when financial aid was influential um so that's one piece

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getting into this next but then when we wrote we wanted to place greater emphasis on the highest quality studies you know the ones that were most trustworthy you know and make the strongest conclusions based on those also had a few different ways of doing that one of them is we wanted to use studies with the design that drew the

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strongest conclusion you know as list a list of notes where you can really use the word effect most meaningfully um and so it's not often but there were certainly studies that we reviewed particularly around teaching and learning that randomly assigned students to exposure to certain types of experiences and other students to not

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have those experiences and so those are the ones where we can draw the strongest conclusions so we placed greater weight on those also for many of the chapters we really cared about change over time and so in that case we really wanted studies that were longitudinal so you've

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got the pretest you've got the post-test and so you can make conclusions about change as opposed to just looking at people you know in the first year their third year and without looking at where students started in the first place another thing we valued was that were more generalizable in terms of

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having multiple institutions within their samples so that you know some of the dynamics wouldn't be specific to one particular institution some others that are a little more straightforward is you know value ones that conducted sort of appropriate analyses so if the data had

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students within institutions do you account for that appropriately ones that included you know sort of the more trustworthy measures of college experiences and outcomes as well whenever possible is also nice that when some studies were able to look at sort of the process you know that like this

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this experience might lead to some intermediate thing which then leads to some you know kind of main outcome of interest and so place greater attention on studies that could shed some of those additional insights into that right okay

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so given the volume and the comprehensive nature of this book it seems like that gives us some cause for the reason why the subtitle of this book is different right like we need 21st century evidence that higher education works and the first sentence of chapter

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one reads that the purpose and value of higher education is under fire so Matt we know that a college education matters those of us who work here but what changes did you find that might be on the horizon with a shifting political

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landscape and how does this book and the research summarized in this book help us make a stronger case that college matters that's a great question I think you know Americans tend to think with their wallets whether that's a fortunate

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or unfortunate way of going about making sense of the world around them so we know that mode one of the motivating factors for folks who show up to vote is how they're doing economically and one of the ways that folks have kind of expressed that in terms of thinking about college education is what they

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think about the value and purpose of education is often wrapped in how they're thinking about how much money College actually costs and affordability is a huge issue in higher education and it's something that we really need to get a handle on and there's a lot of research in thinking about how to make college more affordable

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and so because College has become so expensive folks I think in the country are starting to question is it worth it is college actually worth the investment and what we're trying to say in this book is not only is it worth the investment economically not only is it

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worth the investment in terms of you know quality of life indicators far beyond college but when you're in college you're actually learning what you need to learn you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who is a caretaker of anybody send their person when they're

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sick to somebody who doesn't have a college degree at least to some to some degree the folks who are coming to college to learn their chemistry are learning their chemistry the folks who are coming to college to learn their accounting are learning their accounting right they know accounting they know

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their numbers they know their math they know the science they know their literature base far beyond what a high school graduate knows and so there is this way that I think we need to consistently make the claim that College is working and so I think that because

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of the way that the landscape politically is trying to shape the narrative we're able to say you know what yes affordability is an issue yes issues of access are really important to understand but once students come to us we do do a good job at giving them and

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equipping them with what they need to be effective system citizens in society at least as the data in this book suggests now we have to keep in mind of course right that the we reviewed articles about 2002 Oh to 2013 and sometimes it

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takes a very long time for work to go from an original idea into print into the status that we can actually look at for review so some of the data provided in the book are actually from data collection efforts maybe in the 90s so

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we may see in the next generation of scholarship we might not see as profound effects in terms of thinking about economic indicators of success for college going but at least as far as this book is concerned we are able to say on every measure I mean we have more work to do quite frankly with particular

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practices and we can talk about that as we move on here but at the end of the day we are able to actually say yes we do have an evidence here that college is working great so we've had several fabulous questions from Twitter so I want to thank those of you who are who are following along and

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asking great questions we're going to try to incorporate those as we go through kind of some summaries of the findings and and help folks who are watching kind of understand you know based on your experiences what are the things that you learned if you reviewed

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both what had been written before as well as what you reviewed with this particular group but I wanted to just jump back really quickly and ask if if one of you could answer the question by Kevin guy dree I hope I'm pronouncing

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your last name right Kevin did you all focus solely or primarily on secondary literature meta studies or high quality review who who would like to kind of take that I can talk about that um so we

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did in some cases when they were available when they were strong quantitative meta analyses or qualitative synthesis of the literature we definitely drew on those so you know sometimes to get an overall idea of it and also as a starting place to identify

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additional research and especially even when we didn't rely on them in great detail you know we tried whenever possible to refer readers and to say hey for review see etc etc and this consistent with some of our earlier comments about using it as a starting

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place because we wanted to point these out not just for the purposes of our review but also so that people who are really interested in more detail in these topics oh you know because we don't have enough space to go in to moodle's of detail for everything um but pointing people in that direction great so if I understand correctly how

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you all kind of divided up the work in the of the book and took responsibility for sections I'd love to hear if you could based on the experience you had writing your section and reviewing other work if you could speak specifically about one thing you learned or a couple

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of things that you learned that you would like Student Affairs folks to know about the work you reviewed so unless I'm going to start with you and my understand is that we will start with psychosocial changes that occur during college that are relevant to students

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work yes so the areas that that I explored had to do with psychosocial development and also I looked closely at attitudes and values as you can imagine that it was a pretty expansive set of outcomes that were included in those

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chapters I mean just to give you a sense of that everything from identity formation to student self understanding their leadership skills their attitudes toward diversity socio-political attitudes all kinds of things were found

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in those chapters so it's challenging to decide what what to focus on and in providing some thoughts and reflections on on what the literature had to say over the last decade but there were two areas that I thought kind of really stood out to me so I want to

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just comment briefly on those two one the first that I want to talk about is psychological well-being so that was an area that really got increased attention in the last decade and I think much of that attention reflects the fact that

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students are coming to college these days experiencing or or just reporting more mental challenges than they did in past decades and what we saw in some of the longitudinal research that was that a lot of those challenges are taking place especially in the first year of

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college that that's where we're really seeing kind of that dip in mental health and that the change from the first and the fourth year of college is a little bit more marginal in terms of that decline so what is it what is it that is having this kind of effect on students what's making it better or worse for

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students and a lot of the research talks about that it's really all about quality relationships with with other students with faculty that students really need a strong support network when relationships are negative in quality when students are feeling unsafe or

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pressured by their peers or they're having difficulty in the Hall's in some regard that's when we see more of those kinds of emotional struggles and it also turns out that identity is playing an important role here too so for instance one thing we know is that the gender gap and emotional health

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with women having lower levels of well-being that gender gap tends to widen during the college years we also know that that students of marginalized identities racial sexual or otherwise are also reporting lower levels of well-being and experience those downward

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shifts to a greater degree during college so there's there's a lot of potential reasons for this I think one thing that really stood out though was issues around campus climate so when we have tensions on campus when there's experiences that students are having with discrimination that tends to result

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in higher levels of anxiety and depression for students particularly of certain identities so that's one area that I wanted to talk about the other area that really stood out to me in the review was the effect of diversity experiences on campus and I think this

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is so important especially for Student Affairs educators to think about because a lot of our diversity efforts on campus are being scrutinized as of late and our literature base is so strong in terms of the the strong effects of different

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kinds of diversity experiences that we see among students and its diversity attitudes are certainly affected by that kind of exposure but it's all kinds of things so cross the board in the chapters I worked on whether it's curricular diversity experiences that

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co-curricular kinds of programming that students are having around diversity or even kind of the informal things interactional diversity these these experiences are affecting everything from students academics self-concept their leadership development their well-being their civic and political

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attitudes and so forth so it really kind of across the board that kind of exposure is having an impact we know that effects tend to be stronger the more diversity exposure that students have and that it's a lot more about the quality of those experiences

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not just how often they're happenings it's not just the frequency of those experiences and it really depends on the type of of interaction that students are having in terms of the effect that we see so some there's there for certain outcomes

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it's the informal stuff it's the interactional kinds of experiences that students are having that really yield some of those positive gains and one example of that is students attitudes toward LGBTQ people it's about knowing someone it's about having a relationship

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that really yields those kinds of positive attitudes all right thanks so much Greg tell us a little bit about what you found about regarding a career in economic impacts of college yeah there's a lot there and we have limited

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time so I'm going to focus specifically on where most of the evidence seems to to exist and that's in relationship to post college earnings so there's a lot of outcomes we look at in and discussing the career and economic influences of

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college earnings is not and by any means the most important one to focus on but it is where the evidence is the strongest and where frankly we get I would say the most questions from folks outside of academia people care as Matt mentioned a lot about where their money

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goes and what it turns into from an investment standpoint and here we really see some striking evidence from this past decade of work we see that for example per every year of college completed an individual makes on average 5% more most college that's immediately

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after college and that increases over time and almost doubles over the next decade or so post college when you start to think about degrees or credential completion we see at say the vocational or associate's degree level we see

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somewhere in the order of three to seven percent or so earnings effects of those credentials in terms of bachelor's degree that jumps up from anywhere from 15 to almost 27 percent across different studies that we reviewed these ranges we

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report are necessary because different studies use different methods for defining when earnings were collected and different aspects of the study design so we're trying to create a to give you the best feel for what the evidence suggests and of course graduate

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degrees create substantial earnings differences but that really changes a lot depending on what the field of study is or the particular degree whether it's a master's an MBA a PhD a law degree for example but of course we have to think carefully about costs we know the costs

40:24

are a major concern these days have been for decades and there too when we look at the literature where folks have really rigorously taken into account all of the costs the direct costs like tuition but also the indirect costs like forgone employment earnings during

40:40

college we still see that a return on investment the kind of metric you can compare to other potential investments you can make in our world we see that higher education yields a fifteen to twenty percent return on investment it tends to be closer to twenty percent for

40:56

people who go to public schools because the costs are lower tends to be closer to 15% for folks who go to private schools as costs or more nevertheless that's a pretty substantial return on investment by it by most people's standards if I knew for sure there was

41:11

an investment that would yield that rate of return I would seriously consider putting some resources into it so that's I think notable another really notable piece of evidence from this work is the profound influence of college major

41:27

in fact deciding your major plays a bigger role in determining your career earnings then does where you go to school or even if you go to school so let me put this another way whether what you decide to study as your major

41:43

actually has a bigger impact on your future earnings then the decision whether to even go to college so we see the reason for that is there are upwards of 40 to 50% difference in earnings across majors which is quite staggering right so in the book we

41:59

talked a bit about the high earning majors the lower earning majors we talked a bit about the research that suggests why that may be and there's also a kind of an interesting somewhat blessing somewhat curse of a finding to show that it's not just what you major

42:14

in but landing it that's closely related to your major amplifies those earnings effects of a degree so if you study a lower earning degree and you work in that field you'll have even you know lower earnings and if you study something at the very high end

42:30

of the earnings distribution and you land a job closely related to your degree nevertheless helping students find employment within their field is really it has huge economic implications let's see the last thing I want to say

42:46

is that and before I let the others weigh in when we talk a lot about these statistics and percent changes and earnings and whatnot an important thing to keep in mind is these are these are really conservative estimates we're talking about individual so private individual returns

43:04

that we can count in in monetary ways these don't take into account the non-monetary benefits of a college education like better health over time these don't take into consideration the social or public benefits of a college

43:19

education and so it's really important to take this into account we found in one study that we referenced in the book that looked to examine simply tax revenues from college graduates relative to government spending on higher education and found a social monetary

43:35

return on investment upwards of 10% so that's really important I think in and kind of this narrative around what education higher education specifically is doing as an engine of kind of economic growth thanks so much Greg I

43:52

try to talk just a little bit about what evidence you found related to competency gains as well as quality of life some heart defect quality of life so I often talk about the book in terms of it brings us as as faculty members and as

44:09

student affairs professionals to really bringing our a-game and the a game is active and applied it's what you do to make that course content come to life and this actually goes back into other literature that says when we practice

44:25

deliberately that which we're studying we will learn more about it and of course that makes complete sense it's guided and learning theory from hundreds of years ago but ours colleges and universities are not always set up in the most active and Applied

44:42

environments you can think about the hundred student or the 500 student lecture hall where there's a sage on the stage talking through a PowerPoint we're not even using a PowerPoint in just lecturing for two and a half hours that

44:57

is definitively and experimentally demonstrated to not be the most effective learning space not a shock but I think that this really provides the evidence for Student Affairs folks who are working in these active and

45:13

applied spaces working with faculty members and service-learning and in coops and in internships helping people make those connections and then reflect on their learning in terms of the content that are learning

45:28

of the courses you think about all of the work that happens in Student Union buildings from marketing and promotions and business and communications and all of this is a petri dish a setting for students to think about what they're learning in a classroom and apply it

45:45

reflect on it and make even greater gains so that's where I think we need to go and really commit as as a higher education Enterprise is to really think creatively about active and applied

46:01

learning environments for all subject matter what do we learn about as Greg mentioned there are more than just economic benefits to going to college this is where the actual college impact literature around between college

46:18

effects are within college effects is really nascent most of the research study compared that I reviewed compares those who have attended in completed college for those who didn't and so what we know from that is that there is a

46:34

pervasive better health outcomes and both self assess as well as living longer and this is not a surprise because people even controlling for income people with a college education choose

46:50

healthier lifestyles by and large and have the cognitive ability to make sense of pretty complex health-related information and so that informs their behavior we also know from the literature that there's improved welfare for one's children college-educated

47:07

people compared to those who have a high school degree read to their kids at a greater rate they have more books they have more sort of a broader sort of cultural milieu for students their children to interact they also engage civically and politically at a higher

47:24

level one of the one areas where we are starting to see some examination of how college affects civic engagement is particularly around major and when it comes to major the stem areas and business majors tend to on average have

47:42

lower civic engagement and lower political participation than their peers in education and then the social sciences so I think that this is important because those are the majors that have seen the greatest uptick in terms of students pursuing science

47:57

technology engineering math of business it's certainly the case on my campus and so I think we need to consider how a higher education realize the mandate and our long-standing value of educating people who will engage civically in our

48:15

democracy thank you much next talk to us a little bit about what you learned regarding educational attainment and persistence what was what was the literature that you found related to student airs on that um so I

48:31

want to talk about some of like a couple big themes that cut across a lot of findings give me the time that we have the first one found that if you pair some sort of academic initiatives so something like a first-year seminar Living Learning Program something like that and pair it with some form of

48:47

student services whether this be you know mentoring advising tutoring etc etc those interventions that intentionally put those pieces together had some pretty sizable um positive effects on student retention persistence and graduation um

49:03

interestingly when you looked at those same experiences separately some of which fall into we'll talk in a little bit about the high-impact practices if you had something that was the very standalone here's the first-year seminar it's by itself it's not really connected to anything else bare-bones version

49:20

those tended not to be particularly effective as effective or effective at all um in promoting retention so has has some very interesting implications for partnerships with faculty and practitioners whether in student affairs or academic affairs to really think how

49:37

can we work collectively to solve problems and make it so students don't have to go all over campus to find all these various resources but they can work in one sort of integrated Student Success intervention um this kind of design for them um so that's one theme another theme is consistently looking at

49:54

the different ways of promoting social adjustment engagement and how these promote retention and this could take a number of different forms if you're looking at the quality of relationships that people have um if you're looking at say the impact of living on campus which tends to promote those relationships

50:11

which then tend to promote retention if you're looking at campus climate defined either narrowly or broadly in that like these sorts of ways you know the more that you can get students really involved with so less consist strong evidence but also around campus student

50:27

organizations honest potentially having positive effects that these seem to be related to retention of persistence um the final point and this addresses a couple of questions that we've gotten online is about sort of how generalizable are these effects you know particularly for different groups of

50:43

students I mean at least for my chapter or this chapter here um the effects were pretty similar across you know whether you're talking about race by gender or sex or socioeconomic status um and so on there are a couple of notable exceptions

50:58

and these sections shouldn't be surprising as you might expect financial aid tends to be more influential for students who have the greatest financial needs and therefore you know that's the thing that really decides other or not they can stay in college or not similarly campus racial climate

51:14

tends to be more strongly related to retention for students of color who often face on the negative climates associated with that Matt you are last in our list of different chapter sections

51:30

can you talk a little bit about the cognitive intellectual and moral development findings from the book in like a minute oh wow that's awesome thank you so much for giving me a minute to talk about all things critical thinking mazing okay so I'm gonna go

51:46

rogue here and if I say anything incorrectly you have my colleagues email address so just email them so I think academic challenge is huge okay students have to experience academic challenge when they come to college campuses and in first-year programs what we have

52:02

started to see is that if students aren't experiencing these first-year seminars as academically challenging they have less profound an effect so students who are enrolling for the first time in their college class in a class where the first three months is about learning how to use their email effectively or walking to the library or

52:19

other things like that those aren't necessarily the components of what we would say would be an academically challenging environment there are there is some research to suggest what a challenging curriculum for first-year programs would look like and if pedagogically effective you can

52:35

use email as an entry point or as an assessment way or as a way of kind of illuminating that academic content right there there are ways to rethink those transitional issues that we know are important for students to learn especially first gen students there are

52:51

ways to really innovate in those spaces to make sure that students are learning those lessons without compromising the challenge that should come with rigorous coursework okay so students need to feel like they're academically challenged to make a lot of gains in terms of the critical and moral spaces and I think

53:08

the second piece really quickly I know you didn't give me a lot of time is what does it mean to be a highly impactful practitioner okay this high-impact practice term needs to go away because the weight of the evidence constantly contradicts itself there's no

53:23

one Silver Bullet practice that any practitioner could put on campus and say AHA we got it or a checklist look at all of us look at all these practices it's about the practitioner is there a practitioner in place you can put an advising system like Nick was talking about bring a lot of good thinking

53:39

together to really motivate students to move from the first year to the next all the way through are there people in different programmatic spaces who know how to productively facilitate cross-race interactions or interactions across religious differences and those

53:56

are the kinds of ideas these highly impactful practitioners need to take on in any programmatic space and if they don't know how to do it they need to learn because the research is now so nuanced is to suggest that if students

54:11

are experiencing negative practices in these spaces they aren't learning or they're retreating from learning and so I think these are kind of important lessons to take forward especially in thinking about the book and its implications on student affairs no it was more than a minute but

54:28

you did a good job of how there are multiple questions so thanks and we're gonna move to final thoughts actually because I'd like for us to extend the learning for the folks who are watching today so in your final thoughts talk a little bit about one thing you like

54:44

folks to take away from this episode and if you have a resource or a specific our website or professional development activity that you'd like to share that will help you to continue this conversation outside you can share that during your final thought as well and I

55:02

think we're gonna search with Tricia do you want to start first person sure I think what I take away from this conversation is that it's not about the practice it's about the people who are doing it and so the opportunity to train

55:17

our folks to see the opportunity for our own professional development and the chance to reach out and really partner meaningfully and not at the eleventh hour with our faculty colleagues but to bring them to the table so that they're

55:33

part of the conversation as we initially research and as we begin to develop these practices as we think through the implementation inviting them to be part of the evaluation and the extent to which we can also interface that with

55:49

their scholarship will help to break down what I think has spent for too long two sides of two staircases that meet at the top and our students see these two silos they see a divided house they can't understand or make sense of it why

56:06

can't we come together and say it's not about the practice it's not the awesome service-learning it's the people who are making the relationships and moving forward and I'll pass it on all right thanks so much Nick they're your final

56:23

thoughts so we got a little pushback in concluding you know what are like the most impactful you know practices across everything but if you had to boil it down into two broad categories that seem to have a positive effect on lots and lots of different outcomes those two

56:39

areas are diversity experiences and good teaching and there's a lot that student affairs practitioners can do in both of those areas considering I mean good teaching is something that doesn't just happen in the classroom but the sort of teaching and learning dynamic that can happen in various places whether they be

56:55

formal workshops or informal conversations or so on so if you're thinking about you know like the short short version I would also encourage people to use them you know this as we talked about the beginning as a resource if you're like hey I want a starting place to think of you know where do I go or what do we know about this to have

57:13

their great thanks so much Nick um Matt final thought sure I think I want to empower folks to empower the message of higher education works and use the book to think about that message but also

57:29

empower your own narrative as educators okay what does that mean for you how are you consistently educating yourself with regard to what's working and what isn't is there time you're committing in your daily schedule and your weekly schedule to sit to read to

57:47

think to write up the work that you're doing in ways that we can use to include in the next volume how are you thinking about your time in those ways so oftentimes as a former student affairs practitioner I understand this we're so busy doing so

58:03

many things oftentimes putting out fires that we don't build in the time just to think and the time to really empower ourselves to consistently remind our narrative that we are educators and what does that mean and how are we consistently nuancing our thinking and

58:20

moving ourselves forward in those spaces now I think a future episode has to be how we become more effective scholar practitioners blending those two skills and competencies together thanks so much Matt great yeah just a couple final

58:36

thoughts and really I'm gonna echo the last two messages we heard one of kind of disempowering findings that we have and what Nick was describing a really important resource that is provided by this book is not just thinking it within each chapter that's organized by an outcome area but looking across chapters

58:53

and what Nick alluded to I just want to reiterate because it's so both empowering for educators but also important as a takeaway the two types of things we found most predictive across the number that the largest number of outcomes developmental outcomes were exposure to good teaching practices and exposure to the first peers and

59:10

dissimilar perspectives in the classroom that if that doesn't kind of capture your attention then you know I don't know what will another really interesting thing is that that I didn't mention with respect to earnings is GPA drives earnings so study up kids it

59:25

actually has a dollar value attached to it and I'll leave it at that I know we have more to hear from Melissa right now that's it finally your your thought well I think that what my hope is that what folks can take away from today is maybe

59:42

an idea or some inspiration around a finding that they heard that they can kind of think creatively about what this might mean for practice because we've learned we've learned so much about college impact in the last decade but now we really need to figure out what

59:58

that means and we really need the innovation of practitioners who are working to rectly with students we need the the insight that comes from the work that they're doing and really take what we've learned empirical e and shape that learning into practices that will really

00:13

make a difference in students lives great well thank you to all of you for your time today for this fabulous resource for us and also to Erika behind the scenes who is tweeting many of your commentary throughout and to all of you

00:32

who are watching I appreciate your comments and questions we'll try to follow up in the back-channel many of them we couldn't get to today so I wanted to just give you a couple previews of future episodes I'll be back in early May speaking with Native

00:47

American and indigenous scholars about decolonization in higher education and student affairs will be posting additional details about this episode in the coming week tony is also working on an episode for later in May but you can save may 2nd for the episode on

01:04

decolonization and you can receive reminders about this and all of the episodes that we host by subscribing to the higher ed live newsletter or browsing our archives again at higher ed live.com again my name is Heather Shea thanks again to the fabulous panelists

01:20

today and to everybody who's watching I hope everybody makes it a great week

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