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The research literature on how college affects students is expanding at an exponential rate. This paper identifies and discusses ten directions for future research on college impact that have the potential to enhance the quality and importance of the evidence produced.
As a total body of evidence, research on college students is perhaps the single largest area of inquiry in the field of higher education. Over the past 50 years, thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of studies have been conducted with college student samples. Only a subset of this massive body of scholarship is actually concerned with estimating the net or unique impact of the postsecondary experience on students. This subset of studies is distinguishable from the larger body of research primarily by its specific concern with identifying causal linkages between various aspects of the postsecondary experience and different dimensions of student development (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, 2005).
Yet, even if one considers only the research on college impact on students, he or she confronts a huge and complex body of literature that is expanding at an accelerated rate. Based on the number of studies cited in the four most comprehensive reviews conducted to date (Bowen, 1977; Feldman & Newcomb, 1969; Pascarella &Teren/ini, 1991, 2005), and allowing for some overlap, it would not be an exaggeration to estimate that somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 studies of college impact have been conducted. This estimate may actually be conservative in that it is nearly impossible for any review of such a large body of evidence to be absolutely encyclopedic. Thus, an unknown, though hopefully small, percentage of the evidence is likely to have been missed in existing reviews. Furthermore, the volume of research produced for any given time period is increasing at a dramatic rate. For example, the pioneering review of Feldman and Newcomb, published in 1969, reviewed approximately 1,500 studies covering a 40-year period. This translates into an average of roughly 375 studies per decade. Pascarella and Terenzini's 1991 synthesis covered the 20 years of research after 1969 and reviewed about 2,600 studies-roughly 1,300 studies per decade; and the 2005 synthesis published by Pascarella and Terenzini reviewed approximately 2,400 studies produced primarily in a single decade, the 1990s.
Should this current trend of a...