The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1 - 121

The Past, Present, and Future of Residential Colleges

and open universities, was one of guarded optimism. He clearly saw the value of residential
colleges to promote student development in
increasingly large and complicated higher education institutions. He also saw distinctly the
ongoing set of problems that prevented these
experiments in educating the whole student
from spreading widely. What he did not see,
and probably could not have foreseen, was
the complex social and economic transformations that would roil higher education for
the following two decades. The golden age of
economic expansion the industrial world had
enjoyed for the previous 30 years came to an
abrupt end after the Yom Kippur War, the oil
embargo, and the subsequent recession. State
budgets declined precipitously, and the opportunity for experimentation that had marked
the previous decade died a slow death. The
unsustainable growth in enrollments that had
driven the higher education expansion of the
previous two decades declined markedly. The
student enrollment funding model that had
bankrolled, for a time, this remarkable growth
was slowly replaced by a funding model that
replaced state appropriations with federally financed research and student aid (first in the
form of grants and more recently in the form
of guaranteed loans). The effect of this gradual
transformation in higher education institutions reinforced the German research model
and, once again, sidelined the Oxbridge model
that many of these residential and experimental colleges had championed. While some of
the experimental colleges faded away, most
of the existing residential colleges survived;
however, the expansion of the model that had
been so prominent in the sixties and early seventies slowed to a crawl. It took a change of

direction in student affairs, which began in the
1990s, to bring the residential college model
back to the front burner.

FORWARD
The early and mid-1990s brought about a clarifying re-envisioning of purpose within student
affairs, urged by several key publications promoting the value of out-of-class learning. An
American Imperative (Wingspread Group on
Higher Education, 1993) and The Student
Learning Imperative (ACPA, 1996) charged
student affairs educators to align and focus
their efforts toward student learning outside
of the classroom (Keeling, 2006). This charge
was bolstered by studies concluding that experiences outside the classroom are key factors in
promoting student learning and development
(Ender, Newton, & Caple, 1996; Kuh, 1993; Kuh,
Schuh, & Whitt, 1991). Later research argues
that elements of student learning and student
development are linked (Keeling, 2006).
Though this empirical data does not
serve to determine the statistical significance
between classroom and out-of-classroom
learning, it illuminates the value of an often diminished emphasis on out-of-classroom learning or the affective learning posited by Gordon.
In contrast to the time-honored delineation, reflecting the bifurcation of academic affairs and
student affairs, Gordon’s research found that
experimental colleges were not solely focused
on what he called cognitive gains. “Affective
gains, then, appear among the stated purposes of most sub-colleges” (1974, p. 237). In
general, student affairs as a discipline used residential programs to initiate collaboration with
faculty to address the gap between students’
intellectual and social experiences (Bourassa &
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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1