Higher Education and Moral Development.

Abstract

My subject is not whether the experience of higher education contributes to the moral development of those who are exposed to it, but rather what forms that development may take, and through what mechanisms and processes it occurs. The question of whether higher education has an influence on the moral development of students is a special case of the broader question of what impact, if any, colleges have on the people who pass through them. Currently, there is a fashionable, widely held position which asserts " argues" is too strong a word that higher education does not have much effect of any kind. For example, the cover page of a recent issue of Psychology Today advertised an interview with Theodore Newcomjb with the title "Why College Does Not Change Students."2 In the table of contents the same interview is given a slightly different title: "What Does College Do For A Person? Frankly, Very Little." On the first page of the interview itself, however, when asked "What does college do for a person?" Newcomb answers "Frankly, very little that is demonstrable" (emphasis added). And by the second page Newcomb is saying "I don't want to paint too black a picture. Certainly some students get interested in ideas, learn how to read, learn how to use libraries, learn to think in ways they simply would not do in another setting. Unfortunately, I don't think these benefits happen often enough."3 We are now a long way from the front cover, and have arrived at a statement with which most of us can agree. The experience of higher education can and does have powerful effects on some students; I might have added other effects to Newcomb's short list. But since neither Theodore Newcomb nor I, nor anyone else, knows how often it happens, or how deep and widespread these effects are on how students think and feel, it is not difficult for us to agree that "it doesn't happen often enough." There really is no doubt that the experience of higher education has effects on students, both in their attitudes and behaviors. Newcomb and Feldman have summarized much of the evidence on these effects for us, and more evidence has appeared since their book was published.4 It is true that most of the indicators of change in our research on the effects of higher education leave us dissatisfied: they are not adequate measures of things we are really interested in, such as the growth and refinement of a student's sensibilities, the development of independence of mind, personal integrity, and moral autonomy. We know that these qualities are extremely difficult to study systematically: we don't know how to measure them; their appearance in action is often delayed until long after the college years; they are the product of a person's whole life experience, so that it is difficult to disentangle the independent effects of the college experience on them. Nevertheless to infer from the difficulty of measurement that these effects do not occur"What does college do for a person? Not