Institutional Strategies. A New Three-Part Series
Dr. Terenzini has 30 years of experience in higher education as a teacher, researcher, and administrator. Before coming to Penn State, Terenzini held administrative and/or teaching positions at Dean College (MA), Syracuse University, the State University of New York at Albany, and the University of Georgia. He has published 100 articles in refereed journals and made numerous invited presentations at national and international scholarly and professional conferences.
In your book, you talk about five influences that have changed research trends in the past decade. What do you see as the most important aspects that will affect research in the future?
I expect the growth in research attention to the experiences (and
associated consequences) of historically underrepresented, first-generation,
and low-income students to continue. And it should. The numbers of
such students are rising rapidly, and they are among our empirically
least-understood students. The same might be said for community college
students, and while the overlap may be considerable, it’s far
from complete. We really do need to know more about our community
colleges and their students. I also think practitioners and scholars
need to pay more attention to the internal organizational characteristics
of our institutions: how we structure ourselves, how we deploy personnel,
how much we allocate to certain areas, the criteria we use to hire
and promote faculty members, how much we coordinate and integrate
programmatic planning within and across vice-presidential divisions.
I’m increasingly inclined to think that what institutions do
is very much more important than what they are (e.g., public/private,
large/small, liberal arts/research intensive, selective/not-selective,
wealthy/less-wealthy). Colleges and universities are hugely complex
social systems, but we continue to focus our research and programmatic
efforts on discrete aspects of students’ college experiences – the
classroom, the residence halls, first-year seminars, financial aid,
and a wide array of particularistic, well-intentioned interventions
designed to promote student performance or persistence. It’s
more complicated than that, and trying to understand it piecemeal
won’t be much help.
You noticed that current research shows that, above all, “specific college experiences affect a student’s persistence and educational attainment regardless of the characteristics of the institution attended.” What advice do you have for Student Support Services administrators and staff who want to create an environment at their institution that encourages students to earn their degree?
The research makes it pretty clear that it’s what happens after students enroll in a college or university that really matters, and we have some programmatic and policy control over the educational experiences student have (for better or worse). But I don’t believe that the answer lies in “best practices” imported from somewhere else. Indeed, such a “find-the-silver-bullet” approach is likely to be only marginally effective. Individual interventions or programs work to some extent, and I don’t want to under-value those efforts. But their impact is probably a good deal less than it might be if they are just one part of a larger, purposeful, integrated plan to provide the kinds of experiences and environments we know promote learning and persistence. Colleges and universities need to think systemically, to think “collaboration” both within and across organizational units. Think “integration” to create an environment in which everyone has a responsibility and a role to play in promoting students’ learning. When that happens, persistence will take care of itself.
Community colleges have really begun to fill a void in post-secondary education, especially as the number of minority and under-privileged students continuing their education after high-school increases. Are these institutions doing a good job at educating their students and what is their role in the future of post-secondary education?
The research that has appeared since 1990 paints a rather different picture of the educational effectiveness of community colleges than does the literature published before 1990. Students’ seeking a bachelor’s degree who begin their college careers at a community college are still about 15 percent less likely to earn a baccalaureate degree and to attend a professional or graduate school than are students beginning at a four-year institution, even when differences in the kinds of students who attend the two types of institutions are taken into account. That gap, in my view, remains one of the biggest challenges community colleges face. Having said that, however, other evidence indicates that (net of other factors) community college students develop cognitive skills to about the same degree as do their four-year counterparts. Some evidence also suggests that the gains are greatest among students of color, older students, and less affluent students – those who need it most and those most likely to attend a community college in the first place. Finally, once community college students transfer to a four-year institution and graduate, having started at a community college imposes no penalty on subsequent earnings. Community colleges will be a significant player in the nation’s postsecondary system for a long time to come, and faculty members, administrators, scholars, and policy makers best start behaving that way.
Where do you see a need for improvement in research, practices, and services in the student retention field?
As you might have guessed from my comments above, I think practitioners and scholars alike are seriously underestimating the range of influences on students’ learning and their persistence decisions. Those influences are a daunting array: students’ individual characteristics, their expectations of college, the experiences they have once enrolled, and the internal organizational structures, practices, programs, and policies that shape those experiences. That’s a formidable collection, but addressing them piecemeal will yield only marginally better performance, if that. Indeed, recent evidence from the National Center on Education Statistics suggests that persistence rates improved hardly at all from the 1980s to the 1990s, despite the volume and variety of efforts undertaken to change things. As I see it, we just have to stop looking for silver bullets and start thinking systemically about the characteristics or “principles” that underlie any and all effective educational practices. And the more our activities, programs, policies, and environments reflect these principles, the more likely we are to succeed in increasing the educational effectiveness (and retention rates) of our institutions.
What’s next for you, both at the Center for the Study of Higher Education and as a researcher?
Penn State’s Center for the Study of Higher Education is the “Energizer Bunny.” We have a wide variety of research programs underway, including studies dealing with equal access for low-income and historically under-represented students, engineering education, faculty members’ efforts to balance careers and families, law school education, and integrating teaching and research. My own research, now and for the foreseeable future, will entail a Spencer Foundation-funded, comprehensive study (with Dr. Robert Reason) of the influences on students’ first-year experiences on their academic success and persistence, and an NSF-supported study (with Dr. Lisa Lattuca) of the factors shaping the preparation of engineering graduates to enter the profession. Both of these studies are enormously interesting to me, but also, I think, highly relevant to the abilities of America’s colleges and universities to educate all students, and of our engineering schools’ abilities to prepare engineers for a rapidly changing economic, technical, social, environmental, and political world. Both of those projects ought to hold me or awhile!
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