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Tim Clydesdale. The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xxiii + 320 pp. $20.20, ISBN 9780226236346.
With a "crisis" of purpose haunting higher education, American institutions explore the goals of their existence as their emerging adult occupants do the same with their purposes in the world. Today, the uncertainties of students rise as their commitments drop in relation to key components of adulthood (such as choice of major, marriage). Responding to this listlessness, Tim Clydesdale's The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to S tudents about Vocation comes at a timely point. Admittedly, some practitioners and other readers may balk at the mixed qualitative-quantitative style, as well as at the sheer magnitude of the study. Nevertheless, The Purposeful Graduate offers statistical and anecdotal insights unparalleled in the current research and calls higher education personnel to thought as well as action.
Clydesdale's work recounts and analyzes the $225 million Lilly Endowment initiative in which 88 higher education institutions participated over 8 years, exploring conversations and projects centered on purpose among their faculty, staff, and students. Data collection for this extensive study included interviews, surveys, focus groups, and document reviews. Clydesdale, a sociologist at the College of New Jersey and author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School (University of Chicago Press, 2007), presents his research journey and findings by linking participant narratives with recommendations for practice and reflections on data themes. Helpfully, Clydesdale imbeds diagrams throughout the chapters to explain further the various models and implications he draws from the research. The work s many appendices then provide extensive information regarding the data collection process.
Clydesdale starts the conversation in his book with a broad perspective on the need for purpose exploration as a force of organizational sustainability, competitiveness, and identity formation in higher education. More specifically, Clydesdale contends that emerging adults hunger for meaning and need to develop what he terms "grounded idealism," or "a resilience and a persistence that combined broad contentment with their present lives...