U-M team examines liberal arts impact on students' lives a decade after graduation

Female graduates raise hats at building sign. Image credit: Leon Wu, UnsplashWhat is the impact of a liberal arts education on students' lives?

University of Michigan researchers were recently awarded a $ane.one million grant extension to answer this question with greater richness than previously possible.

For more than two years, the College and Across Two project at U-Thousand has been asking this question, and others, as it studies the impact of a liberal arts education. CBII is a 3.5-year study supported by $iv.27 meg in grant funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, including the recent extension of $ane.1 one thousand thousand.

CBII is breaking new basis by combining measures of liberal arts experiences derived from institutions' educatee transcripts and other records with information well-nigh their graduates' lives collected from a survey.

CBII is as well surveying graduates from various backgrounds approximately x years after graduating from participating institutions. Graduates are beingness asked nearly their current perceptions and atmospheric condition in numerous domains such as health and well-beingness, civic and political engagement, writing skills, noncognitive skills (openness to multifariousness, pluralistic orientation, career adjustability), the economy and the labor market place.

"The most of import innovation of this projection is that information technology allows us to wait at rich information most students when they were in school simultaneously with information collected from the survey most their current capabilities and characteristics," said Paul Courant, U-M professor emeritus of economics, information and public policy.

Courant, main investigator of the project, says researchers are not relying on alumni to remember the nature of their course-taking, which could innovate a variety of biases and recall errors.

"The ability to learn what their graduates were up to 10 years later was one of the big selling points for institutions to participate. Typically they know a lot about their students while enrolled, simply about nothing after they leave," said Kevin Stange, CBII project co-investigator and a U-Thou associate professor of public policy.

The project is housed within the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Inquiry at U-M'south Institute for Social Research. Co-principal investigators include Susan Jekielek, associate research scientist at ICPSR; Tim McKay, U-Thousand acquaintance dean for undergraduate pedagogy and professor of physics; Margaret Levenstein, director of ICPSR; and Allyson Flaster, assistant research scientist at ICPSR.

CBII is simultaneously developing quantitative measures of the liberal arts feel, which draws on the work of McKay, data scientist Ben Koester and research assistant Nick Paulson.

"We expect a liberal arts education to include both breadth and depth," McKay said. "Both are encouraged by requirements, and students are given not bad freedom in deciding how to meet them.

"Our analyses allow united states of america to see how students use this liberty. They let the states run across how liberal arts students are differing from engineering students, how history majors are dissimilar from physics majors. Well-nigh half of the variance in the educatee experience comes from major option, and the other half from how each educatee chooses to use the freedom colleges provide."

Parallel with developing quantitative liberal arts measures, the project is as well gathering insights on the touch on of the liberal arts from an ongoing year-long, nationwide colloquium series chosen "Liberal Arts and Life" with thought-leaders and researchers with expertise in undergraduate pedagogy.

The series has provided a forum for discussing what is currently known about liberal arts teaching, demonstrating new means to measure it, and exploring how the noesis gained from doing so can be used to meliorate undergraduate education.

In summer 2022, the CBII team will brand the de-identified data—which at present includes nearly 500,000 students enrolled in approximately 15,000,000 courses—available to participating institutions, project collaborators and the broader research community through ICPSR.

Jekielek says this new dataset will facilitate utilize of large data techniques in teaching research.

"The projection is benefiting from bringing together unlike disciplinary perspectives and information science approaches to educational data," she said.

Looking to the time to come, the researchers are discussing means their work could be repeated at a larger calibration for a larger number of institutions. The ultimate goal for the projection is to provide concrete guidance about how the liberal arts feel can be measured quantitatively as well as robust empirical evidence on the relationship between a liberal arts education and longer-term outcomes.

Withal, CBII'southward impact is more simply the results of a research written report, Levenstein says.

"Higher and Across II is building community and capacity, and a new data infrastructure," she said. "This research matters to anyone who ever went to or wondered about college."

Since its launch in 2019, CBII has established partnerships with 7 public iv-year institutions (including 2 liberal arts colleges) for the airplane pilot stage of the project: U-M, the City Academy of New York, Georgia College and Land Academy, Indiana University, Truman State University, University of Houston and University of California, Irvine.

All institutions participating in the study are public, with diversity in pupil population, educational experiences, and geography. All provided rich institutional data most students including courses taken, grades, majors, demographics, and admissions data going back to at least 2005.

More information:

  • Podcast: "Liberal Arts Education" by Data Brunch on Spotify, Apple tree Podcasts, Soundcloud
  • College and Across Ii: Liberal Arts and Life, a yr-long public colloquium series
  • College and Across 2: Outcomes of a Liberal Arts Education
  • A new resources for undergraduate instruction: Data on the content and consequences of a liberal arts education