A wealth of studies have examined the benefits of earning a college degree. Many of them consider students’ return on investment in financial terms. Research that looks at other outcomes, like learning, is often limited to measuring short-term results.
A new paper, “The Post-Collegiate Influence of Undergraduate Experiences: Intellectual, Civic, and Psychological Outcomes,” scheduled to be presented on Thursday at the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s annual conference, in Portland, Ore., seeks to broaden the conversation by considering the link between particular college experiences and graduates’ noneconomic outcomes.
The paper draws on responses to the Higher Education Data Sharing (HEDS) Alumni Survey of some 20,000 graduates of private colleges belonging to the HEDS consortium as well as public colleges that administer the survey.
The sample has several advantages, the paper notes. It’s large enough to allow the researchers to consider results for subgroups that are often too small to be analyzed in other data sets. And because the survey is given to graduates at different points, often one, five, and 10 years after graduation, researchers can look at consistency over time.
The study uses the sample to consider the relationship between two sets of measures: one describing students’ exposure to particular college experiences, like academic challenge. The other describes the benefits graduates ascribe to their education, like civic development. Here are three takeaways:
Graduates Benefit From Specific College Experiences
The researchers used graduates’ survey responses to determine their exposure to three key features of the college experience. Two of them, good teaching and academic challenge, are drawn primarily from graduates’ responses to questions about the classroom experience, like “faculty challenged my ideas in class,” though the measures also roll in responses about interactions with professors outside of class. A third category, diversity interactions, concerns interpersonal and co-curricular engagement with peers.
The authors then created outcome measures based on graduates’ responses to questions about their intellectual and civic development during college, as well as their affinity for their alma maters. Then they considered the relationship between respondents’ college experiences and those outcomes.
The result? “There are uniform and positive relationships” between the key experiences during college and the outcome measures, said Nicholas S. Bowman, a professor of higher education and student affairs at the University of Iowa and the paper’s lead author. The relationships were particularly strong between experiencing challenge during college and intellectual development; between diversity interactions and civic development; and between good teaching and college satisfaction.
But Some Graduates Benefit More Than Others Do
The study’s sample is not nationally representative, Bowman noted. But given its size, he and his co-authors were able to look at the interplay between college experiences and alumni outcomes for demographic groups that are often underresearched. They found, for instance, that good teaching seems to be particularly beneficial for alumni with nonbinary gender identities.
The researchers also found that diverse interactions had a weaker positive association with their outcome measures for black alumni. That was not the case, Bowman said, for graduates who were Asian or Latinx.
The idea that diverse interactions play out differently by respondents’ race is in keeping with other research, Bowman said. Students of color can face microaggressions and overt racism in such interactions, he said, and are sometimes seen as responsible for educating their peers — all possible explanations for the finding.
The Benefits Are Pretty Consistent Over Time
While the study was able to tease out some small variations, its core findings did not vary much by how recently alumni had finished college. That, the authors write, suggests that the benefits of college may be lasting.
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.