Alexander W. Astin

The Declining "Equity" of American Higher Education

An analysis of three decades of data from national samples of entering college freshmen reveals that (a) there are substantial socioeconomic inequities in access to the most selective U.S. colleges and universities and that (b) American higher education is more socioeconomically stratified today than at any time during the past three decades. The increasing concentration of high-SES students in the most selective institutions appears to have come primarily at the expense of middle-SES students.

Diversity and Multiculturalism on the Campus

(1993). Diversity and Multiculturalism on the Campus. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 44-49.

STATISTICAL ALTERNATIVES FOR STUDYING COLLEGE STUDENT RETENTION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LOGIT, PROBIT, AND LINEAR REGRESSION

While higher education researchers have long been concerned with the development and application of methods to adequately assess the impact of college on students, strong advances in statistical theory and computational practice have shifted this focus from the fundamental issues of research design to the application of appropriate statistics. This study focuses on the practical implications of applying logistic regression, probit analysis, and linear regression to the problem of predicting college student retention. Rather than simply assuming that one technique is analytically superior to others based on theoretical grounds, this study explores how these techniques compare in predicting student retention using data provided by registrars from a national sample of colleges and universities. Results indicate that despite the theoretical advantages offered by logistic regression and probit analysis, there is little practical difference between either of these two techniques and more traditional linear regression.

How risky are one-shot cross-sectional assessments of undergraduate students?

The purpose of this study was to explore the extent of possible input bias associated with the rapidly growing use by colleges and universities of one-time cross-sectional assessments of students. The results presented in this study demonstrate that cross-sectional assessments of enrolled college students are very difficult to interpret because they inevitably reflect characteristics of the same students when they first entered college. For those forms of engagement that have to do with how students allocate their time, it appears that the majority of variation among institutions is attributable to entering freshman characteristics rather than to institutional policies or practices. Thus, rather than relying solely on student outcome data, institutions should ideally also collect pretest or input information from the same students when they first matriculate.

New measures of college selectivity

Institutional averages of entering freshman scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the American College Test (ACT) were combined and edited to produce a single institutional measure of selectivity for 2,601 institutions. Older scores were adjusted to reflect decreasing performance over time, and ACT scores were converted to SAT equivalents, resulting in a final measure that reflects 1973 performance levels and is expressed as an SAT Verbal plus Mathematical score (range 400–1,600). Actual scores were available for 1,803 schools; the remaining schools with missing values were given an imputed score based upon means from similar institutions among the 1,803. Correlations between scores from different years and between the final measure and 19 institutional attributes indicated substantial reliability and validity for the selectivity measure.

MAKING SENSE OUT OF DEGREE COMPLETION RATES

It has been more than a decade since the U.S. Congress enacted the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act, which requires colleges and universities to make public their six-year degree completion rates. Like several more recent state “assessment” initiatives, the reasoning behind this federal law was presumably to make higher education institutions more “accountable” by requiring them to collect and disseminate data reflecting institutional “quality” or “performance.” As someone who has made a good part of his living from assessment activities and who has regularly encouraged college officials to carry out more and better assessments of their students, in recent years I’ve found myself in the rather peculiar position of cautioning administrators and policy makers about the hazards of assessment. Although an institution’s degree completion rate is just one of several potentially misleading assessment indicators in widespread use today, its limitations illustrate a basic weakness inherent in several other popular assessment activities (Astin & Lee, 2003).

Criterion-Centered Research

THIS paper is concerned with clarifying certain issues regarding criterion measures and their use in educational and psychological research. The problems to be considered will be discussed separately in three general categories. 1. The Nature and Role of the Criterion (definitions, common fallacies about criteria, and certain logical and technical considerations in developing criterion measures) . 2. Criteria and Test Development (the function of criteria in the construction and validation of tests). 3. Criterion-Centered Research versus Construct Validity (similarities and differences between the two approaches, and the case for criterion-centered research) .

The Changing American College Student: Implications for Educational Policy and Practice.

New students entering higher education institutions in the United States have undergone dramatic changes during the past two decades. This paper summarizes some of the major trends observed in these surveys and discusses possible implications of the findings for educational policy and practice.Each fall since 1966 the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles has been conducting a national survey of new college freshmen. A typical survey involves 250,000 students and a nationally representative sample of 550 higher education institutions of all types. Between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s American college students became much more focussed on material goals and less concerned with altruism and social problems. These value changes were accompanied by dramatically increased student interest in business careers and a sharp decline of interest in school teaching, social work, nursing, the clergy, and other service careers. These changes are perhaps best illustrated in the contrasting trends in two values: ‘being very well off financially,’ which doubled in popularity during the period of survey and ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life’ which was the top student value in the early 1970s but was endorsed by fewer than half as many students by the late 1980s.During just the past two or three years most of these trends seem to have ended or, in certain cases, shown signs of reversing direction. At the same time, there is growing evidence that students are increasingly oriented toward social activism. Protecting the environment appears to be the single greatest concern among American college students at the turn of the decade.

Equanimity and Spirituality

The impetus for preparing this paper grew out of an extended series of conversations with a group of colleagues that has been discussing the concept of “spirituality,” its meaning, and its role in higher education. Recently the two of us reached a point where we agreed that one potentially useful way to approach the definitional problem would be to describe what a “spiritual” person or a person who is “highly developed spiritually” would be like. When we asked ourselves what personal qualities such a person would be likely to display, one of the first constructs that came to mind was “equanimity.” These abstract musings have recently taken on a more concrete form in connection with a national study of college students’ spiritual development that is currently under way at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) with support from the Templeton Foundation. The research team for this project elected to view the concept of spirituality in multidimensional terms. In effect, this decision assumes that spirituality is not a unitary construct, that it probably has several components, and that it can be manifest or expressed (and measured) in several different ways.

Undergraduate Aspirations: A Test of Several Theories.

Two significant sociological theories which have been invoked in research about undergraduate aspirations are tested. The data, based on a national sample of students, contain some key measurements which had been missing from previous studies as well as a series of additional control variables. In general, relative-deprivation theory receives strong support; environmental-press theory receives equivocal support. However, the results vary as a function of the particular kind of aspiration under consideration. These findings support the contention that a complete theoretical model should allow for the simultaneous operation of both theories in a complex pattern rather than forcing a choice between the two.