An understanding of today s undergraduate college students is vital to the effectiveness of our nation s colleges and universities. As Generation on a Tightrope clearly reveals, today s students need a very different education than the undergraduates who came before them: an education for the 21st Century, which colleges and universities are so far ill-equipped to offer and which will require major changes of them to provide. Examining college student expectations, aspirations, academics, attitudes, values, beliefs, social life, and politics, this book paints an accurate portrait of today s students. Timely and comprehensive, this volume offers educators, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and employers guidance and a much-needed grasp of the forces shaping the experiences of current undergraduates. The book: * Is based on completely new research of 5,000 college students and student affairs practitioners from 270 diverse college campuses * Explores the similarities and differences between today s generation of students and previous generations

When Hope and Fear Collide

by Arthur Levine

Published 27 February 1998
The clock becomes your enemy when reading this book. The revelations propel you along causing you to read faster and faster to the next line, paragraph, page, and chapter. Must reading for anyone concerned about higher education and the future. This will be the most often quoted research and literature on student demographics for all higher education during the next decade! -Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, executive director, NASPA In his 1980 book When Dreams and Heroes Died, Arthur Levine presented a portrait of a generation of college students without heroes - a generation that turned inward, away from activism and community and toward individual and material gain. But when Levine returned to campuses in the 1990s, he discovered a startling and encouraging shift in the attitudes of the new generation of students. When Hope and Fear Collide examines a generation motivated by a conflicting sense of hope and fear. While today's students fear a great many things both on a global and local level they are less pessimistic than the previous generation, as they look for ways to make a difference in their world.
Campus faculty, administrators, and student services professionals are in a pivotal position - able to nurture students' hopes and help them confront and overcome their fears. Levine and Cureton give them the information they need to make a difference.Contents:Generation Without a NameFlaws, Problems, and Decline: The New LocalismCampus Politics: Let the Buyer Beware!Multiculturalism: The Campus DividedPersonal Life: Retreat from IntimacyAcademics: Search for an Insurance PolicyThe Future: Doing Well of Doing GoodConclusion: A Transitional GenerationArthur Levine is president and professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Jeanette S. Cureton served as assistant to the president at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, and as a research assistant to Arthur Levine at the Harvard Graduate School of Educa