WR152: BU & the Culture of College

A mentor, advisor, or even a friend? Making connections in college makes all the difference. What single factor makes for an excellent college education? As it turns out, it's pretty simple: human relationships. Decades of research demonstrate the transformative potential and the lasting legacies of a relationship-rich college experience. Critics suggest that to build connections with peers, faculty, staff, and other mentors is expensive and only an option at elite institutions where instructors have the luxury of time with students. But in this revelatory book brimming with the voices of students, faculty, and staff from across the country, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments can and should exist for all students at all types of institutions. In Relationship-Rich Education, Felten and Lambert demonstrate that for relationships to be central in undergraduate education, colleges and universities do not require immense resources, privileged students, or specially qualified faculty and staff. All students learn best in an environment characterized by high expectation and high support, and all faculty and staff can learn to teach and work in ways that enable relationship-based education. Emphasizing the centrality of the classroom experience to fostering quality relationships, Felten and Lambert focus on students' influence in shaping the learning environment for their peers, as well as the key difference a single, well-timed conversation can make in a student's life. They also stress that relationship-rich education is particularly important for first-generation college students, who bring significant capacities to college but often face long-standing inequities and barriers to attaining their educational aspirations. Drawing on nearly 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 29 higher education institutions across the country, Relationship-Rich Educationprovides readers with practical advice on how they can develop and sustain powerful relationship-based learning in their own contexts. Ultimately, the book is an invitation--and a challenge--for faculty, administrators, and student life staff to move relationships from the periphery to the center of undergraduate education.

The bestselling analysis of higher education's impact, updated with the latest data How College Affects Students synthesizes over 1,800 individual research investigations to provide a deeper understanding of how the undergraduate experience affects student populations. Volume 3 contains the findings accumulated between 2002 and 2013, covering diverse aspects of college impact, including cognitive and moral development, attitudes and values, psychosocial change, educational attainment, and the economic, career, and quality of life outcomes after college. Each chapter compares current findings with those of Volumes 1 and 2 (covering 1967 to 2001) and highlights the extent of agreement and disagreement in research findings over the past 45 years. The structure of each chapter allows readers to understand if and how college works and, of equal importance, for whom does it work. This book is an invaluable resource for administrators, faculty, policymakers, and student affairs practitioners, and provides key insight into the impact of their work. Higher education is under more intense scrutiny than ever before, and understanding its impact on students is critical for shaping the way forward. This book distills important research on a broad array of topics to provide a cohesive picture of student experiences and outcomes by: Reviewing a decade's worth of research; Comparing current findings with those of past decades; Examining a multifaceted analysis of higher education's impact; and Informing policy and practice with empirical evidence Amidst the current introspection and skepticism surrounding higher education, there is a massive body of research that must be synthesized to enhance understanding of college's effects. How College Affects Students compiles, organizes, and distills this information in one place, and makes it available to research and practitioner audiences; Volume 3 provides insight on the past decade, with the expert analysis characteristic of this seminal work.

Colleges and universities are richer than ever--so why has the price of attending them risen so much? As endowments and fundraising campaigns have skyrocketed in recent decades, critics have attacked higher education for steeply increasing its production cost and price and the snowballing debt of students. In Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education, Bruce A. Kimball and Sarah M. Iler reveal how these trends began 150 years ago and why they have intensified in recent decades. In the late nineteenth century, American colleges and universities began fiercely competing to expand their revenue, wealth, and production cost in order to increase their quality and prestige and serve the soaring number of students. From that era through today, the rising wealth and cost of higher education have continued to reinforce each other and spiral upward, increasing the heavily subsidized price paid by students. Kimball and Iler explain the strategy and reasoning that drove this wealth-cost double helix, the new tactics in fundraising and endowment investing that fueled it, and economists' efforts to understand it. Using extensive archival, documentary, and quantitative research, Kimball and Iler trace the shifting public perception of higher education and its correlation with rising costs, stagnating wages, and explosive student debt. They show how stratification of wealth in higher education became tightly interwoven with wealth inequality in American society. This relationship raises fundamental questions about equity in US higher education and its contribution to social mobility and democracy.