The Changing College Student

Chapter 1 explains how social science can help students navigate college. Beginning with illustrative student case studies, the introductory chapter describes how social, economic, and cultural changes over the last several decades resulted in the new life course stage called “emerging adulthood.” Emerging adults today are different from the entering college students of the past, which means that today’s students’ experiences are markedly distinct from that of their parents and grandparents. Detailing these differences across generations of entering college students, this chapter discusses the implications of these changes for understanding entering college students today. This chapter also introduces and summarizes the content of the subsequent book chapters.

Resiliency in the Face of Setbacks

Chapter 5 focuses on resiliency, or how students can bounce back from different challenges to build a successful college career. The chapter shows that having challenging experiences during college is a valuable way to build resiliency for life after college. College presents the opportunity to reflect on earlier experiences in families, cultures, groups, and within organizations. For students, reflecting on how their backgrounds affect current choices is crucial for shaping a personal and professional story that can guide important choices while in college, help frame personal statements, and point toward potential career paths after graduation.

Taking Risks and Forming Identity

Chapter 4 explains how exploring and forming a personal and social identity is vital to navigating college. This chapter advises students to exercise personal agency in making key decisions during college, while cautioning students to appreciate the difficulty of these choices and to pay attention to the practicality of different available options. Students learn that one key to college success is taking ownership of learning, and gaining exposure to a variety of course subjects and options for majors in order to decide which is the best fit for their pathway.

How to Understand Emerging Adulthood

Chapter 2 contextualizes emerging adulthood and changing life course development processes within larger economic, social, and cultural trends. Within this context, this chapter discusses the role of contemporary higher education in understanding and adapting to those changes. The chapter explains how changes that created the elongation of life course development, including longer periods of transition into adulthood, help to make sense of modern college students. Students learn how experiences with moving, changing identities, picking an academic path, as well as romantic partnering and breakups, all fit within the life stage tasks of establishing identity while forming intimate and durable relationships. Achieving a better grasp of how transitioning into adulthood looks for young people today helps students understand themselves, meet their needs, and explain themselves to others.

Making Informed Choices, for Now and Later

Chapter 8 explains that college provides a safe place to explore different career options. Students learn that switching majors, interning, working as a research assistant, and talking with professors are all excellent ways to test out majors and assess whether a career in that field is a good fit. Simultaneously, the chapter presents college as a safe space for career exploration and addresses tips for changing majors, talking with parents about desired careers, finding a vocation or career path, and shaping professional identity. The book culminates with a section about how to navigate college, and life generally, with research-based decisions. Following these recommendations will ensure that students continue their journey as learners, informed citizens, and social leaders long after they finish reading this book.

Becoming a Leader and Giving to Others

Chapter 7 helps students learn from personal experiences and overcome structural challenges to become leaders in college. Being a leader requires recognizing one’s personal strengths and learning how to engage those strengths on campus, which builds skills and experiences for broader civic engagement beyond college. The goal in this chapter is to alert students to the ways that college provides an opportunity to construct future paths. Moreover, the chapter presents a wide array of options for finding a niche group or activity on campus, which can help students feel integrated and develop valuable leadership skills.

Harnessing Uniqueness and Finding Similar People

Chapter 6 addresses race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and other aspects of diversity that shape individual students’ expectations and experiences of college life. Some students find the university to have greater diversity than their past experiences, while others come from more diverse settings than the university. Many students struggle for the first time to understand how they fit in and how to make sense of others’ attitudes, values, and perspectives. Students reflect on experiences with inclusion and exclusion during college and come to contextualize these experiences. Readers learn how to harness their identities as a personal strength, while also finding others who are similar enough to understand and support their perspective, values, or interests.

Why College Is Worth It

Chapter 3 addresses the ways that social class, economic resources, and family backgrounds affect students’ experiences of college. Students learn about the value of college: that college is important to earn a degree for specific skills and credentials, while it also teaches the “rules of the game,” referred to in scholarship as acquiring cultural capital. This chapter also addresses how students’ social class backgrounds affect how easy, hard, or different from high school they find the college experience to be, and how these experiences can shape the kinds of skills and talents that students gravitate to and build during college.