Higher education as a stage of transition

Abstract

Critics of higher education have often called attention to its lack of integrating or unifying themes. The nation's colleges and universities exemplify diversity in a pluralistic society, and education beyond the high school is never described as doctrinaire. Diversity, to the contrary, is extolled as higher education's major strength and efforts to impose uniformity seldom succeed. Adult development is believed by many students of higher education to be an integrative theme whose time has come. The part-time student has been a majority student since 1974 and as the average age of college enrollees increases, there are persuasive arguments that colleges should and must become attentive to the needs and interests of adult learners. If institutions of higher education are to be fully responsive to those needs and interests, they must appreciate the stages of development that adults bring to the college campus and the stages to which they are seeking advancement. Art Chickering and 51 associates have produced a symposical tour de force that would make higher education responsive to and responsible for (?) the entire life cycle of "an increasingly diverse range of students" in an incredibly pluralistic society. It all adds up to an awesome challenge for the nation's colleges and universities, and it should set the agendas for national conferences and seminars for a year or two. Critics, observers, and serious students have a reading assignment that will take at least two weeks of concerted, reflective study. The ambition of Chickering et al. will be better appreciated after reading Nevitt Sanford's nine-page foreword. It is the conscious intent of Chickering and his associates to supplant or supersede Sanford's monumental work of the early 1960s, The American College: A Psychological and Social Interpretation of the Higher Learning (Wiley, 1962). Hence the title of Chickering et al.'s The Modem American College (Jossey-Bass, 1981) and its subtitle, "Responding to the New Realities of Diverse Students and a Changing Society." Sanford is appreciative of the gauntlet that The Modern American College tosses at the feet of staid institutions, but he recalls, with commendable integrity, that his own chat-