Richard Arum. "College for what? Getting a Job, Social Relationships and Civic Participation for a Recent Cohort of Emerging Adults."

College contexts and experiences potentially have implications for an individual's social, economic and political outcomes as well as for social inequality. Given that contemporary college students often focus only modest levels of effort on academic pursuits, researchers must take seriously a broader set of life-course outcomes to understand student behavior. This presentation examines life course experiences of a recent cohort of college students, who graduated in Spring 2009 during a period of significant economic difficulties in the U.S. and whose collegiate learning outcomes were documented earlier in Academically Adrift. What sort of post-college transitions - economically, socially and civically - did these students make as emerging adults, how did they understand their college and post-college experiences and to what extent did their outcomes vary? Results highlight the non-academic functions of college for contemporary students.

Richard Arum is professor in the Department of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University.  This year he is serving as Senior Fellow, U.S. Programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; last year he served as director of the Institute for Human Development and Social Change at New York University and the director of Education Research Program at the <http://www.ssrc.org/staff/arum-richard/> Social Science Research Council, where he oversaw the development of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, a research consortium designed to conduct ongoing evaluation of the New York City public schools.  He is coauthor of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), the author of  Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools (Harvard University Press, 2003), and co-editor of a comparative study on expansion, differentiation and access to higher education in fifteen countries, Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study (Stanford University Press, 2007) as well as the cross-national project Improving Learning Environments: School Discipline and Student Achievement in Comparative Perspective (Stanford University Press, 2012) and The Reemergence of Self-employment: A Comparative Study of Self-employment Dynamics and Social Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2004).  Arum received a Masters of Education in Teaching and Curriculum from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.