A new study sheds light on the effects of student life on college success.
Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities, by Dr. Camille Z. Charles, Dr. Mary J. Fischer, Dr. Margarita A. Mooney, Dr. Douglas S. Massey, $35, Princeton University Press, April 2009, ISBN-10: 0691139644, ISBN- 13: 978-0691139647, pp. 320.
In 2002, three of these authors participated in an analysis of what characteristics students from divergent backgrounds in the U.S. brought with them to college. The resulting book, The Source of the River: the Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities, was well received at the time.
That team’s work followed a 1998 study by Dr. William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, which concluded that affirmative action in higher education resulted in significant benefits to students and society. At the same time, the research unveiled disparities in academic performance for different racial and ethnic groups that continue to disturb scholars and administrators.
That study by the former presidents of Princeton and Harvard universities drew from a survey conducted in the mid-1990s on the experiences of people who had been freshmen at select colleges and universities at intervals spanning 40 years. It was heralded as an extraordinary breakthrough in providing empirical data and insight on the effects of affirmative action. Because that study looked back at collegiate experiences after the subjects had been out of college for some time, however, researchers could not adequately explain what factors did or did not contribute to academic success.
To provide more answers, the Mellon Foundation, which Bowen headed, funded the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, which interviewed representative samples of students of diverse backgrounds at 28 schools who entered college in 1999 and interviewed them again each year through 2003.
The authors of Taming the River used data from the longitudinal survey for The Source of the River to look at what effects the differences in students’ backgrounds had on first-term academic performance in college. In Taming the River, they take a logical step forward to examine what students do in the first two years after they get there and what the experience does to them to help explain why students from certain racial and ethnic minority groups lag behind those from other groups in academic achievement.
