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 National Institute on Postsecondary Education, Libraries, and Lifelong Learning (PLLI)


Higher Education and Vocational Education Publications

Tourists in Our Own Land:
Cultural Literacies and the College Curriculum

Clifford Adelman
Senior Research Analyst
Office of Educational Research and Improvement
U.S. Department of Education

Published by the U.S. Department of Education

October 1992
ISBN 0-16-038186-X

A revised version of this monograph appears as Chapter 5 of Adelman, C., Lessons of a Generation: Education and Work in the Lives of the High School Class of 1972. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994, pp. 174-226. An extension of the analysis in this monograph, covering the college careers of the high school class of 1982, was presented to the 1999 National Forum of the Association for Institutional Research under the title, "Revisiting the Culture Wars: What Two Generations of Transcripts Say."

Executive Summary

This is the fourth is a series of monographs based on the data archives of the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS-72). The NLS-72 followed a generation of Americans from high school into their early thirties. The Base Year (1972) Survey sample consisted of 22,652 students for whom high school records and test scores were also recorded. Followup surveys were conducted in 1972, 1974, 1976, 1979, and 1986. Most importantly for this study, the postsecondary transcripts of 12,599 individuals in the sample who attended any kind of school or college at any time between 1972 and 1984 are also included in the archives.

How culturally literate is the generation that is now "thirtysomething"? What did people in that generation study that exposed them to different cultures, societies, and intellectual traditions? Why are these important questions?

The college transcripts of 10,700 students in the High School Class of 1972 who had earned more than 10 college credits by 1984 were examined to provide some clues. That 12-year period gave these students plenty of time to finish college (about half of them did), and to immerse themselves in hundreds of courses providing different kinds of cultural information.

This study first describes what "cultural information" seems to mean in the scholarly literature, how its acquisition is very much like learning a language, how more than one "language" is at stake, and why acquiring information is only the first step to true literacy. Focusing attention on college students also requires us to understand how colleges function as an information system, and how the topics pursued by professors in their research only gradually enter the curriculum and the classroom.

As sources of information on what college students actually study, national transcript samples (such as that of the NLS-72) are preferred to surveys of catalogues, course schedules, and deans because transcripts are more current, reliable, and honest and show us what really happened (course syllabi and assessments would provide more detail, but they are not accessible). The results of some notable surveys of deans are matched against the transcript evidence to drive home this point. No matter what the subject (history, Western civilization, mathematics, literature, foreign language, women's studies), students study more of it than the catalogues and deans say students are required to study.

There are three determinate configurations of cultural information evident in the transcript records: Western culture and society, non-Western culture and society, and minority and women's studies. There are also two configurations of courses in which cultural information is either general or indeterminate: one in the humanities, the other in the social sciences. By looking carefully at student course-taking patterns in these course clusters, the study concludes that:

The sheer amount of time this generation spent studying accounting, physical education, nursing, and electrical circuits, for example, dwarfs the amount of time it spent in all of the streams of cultural information put together.

  • This generation's exposure to cultural literacies other than that of Western societies was extremely limited, and the bulk of its exposure to Western traditions was confined to introductory-level courses.

  • Doctoral degree-granting institutions were the principal providers of information on non-Western culture and society, while comprehensive colleges were the principal providers of information on domestic minority cultures.

  • The curriculum of students at elite colleges (3% of all bachelor's degrees in the NLS-72) is so different from that followed by the other 97% that it is irrelevant to discussions about the diffusion of cultural information.

  • Demography is curricular destiny both inexpected and unexpected ways: as an example of the expected, women comprised 80% of enrollments in Women's Studies courses; as an example of the unexpected, white students were less likely than minority students to study history of any kind.

    • The student is central to this analysis, for it is the student who has been bombarded with requests and requirements from commissions, accreditation bodies, and faculty senates to study this or that. What are today's students to learn from the experience of the NLS-72 generation in the face of all these urgings? The monograph concludes with recommendations to students on how to approach their academic choices so that they become more than tourists in their own land.

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