UC Berkeley

This study investigates how high school and college students reason about commonly accepted purposes of education. The introduction chapter presents a history of purposes of education and scholarly opinions about general purposes and concepts of education in the United States. Guided by social cognitive domain theory (SCDT; also called social domain theory), it captures how students prioritize and coordinate these competing purposes. SCDT recognizes four domains of reasoning about human experience: moral, social conventional, personal, and prudential/pragmatic. This study expands concepts of three SCDT domains to include purposes from educational models of Human Capital and Human Potential (also referred to as Human Capabilities) and extended aspects of socialization. Human capital is integrated with the pragmatic domain; human potential/capabilities is integrated with the personal domain; and socialization processes are integrated with the social-conventional domain. The resulting domains for educational purposes are labeled “HCPragmatic,” “HPPersonal,” “Moral,” and “Socialization.”

The study used mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative). The survey instrument constructed for data collection asked students for demographic information, ratings of 20 commonly recognized purposes of education, and explanations for the most and least rated purposes. This was administered to diverse samples of 451 undergraduate college students from a selective West Coast public university and to 131 high school students from public schools in the West Coast and Southeastern United States.

Both college and high school students categorized and prioritized purposes of education in terms of domains, generally in the following order: HPPersonal, Moral, Socialization, and HCPragmatic. The survey instrument also captured participant domain coordination: the capacity to employ knowledge from more than one domain to reason about and evaluate purposes of education. Students who prioritized HCPragmatic purposes over others displayed significantly less coordination among all purposes of education. Developmentally, younger high school students tended to prefer HCPragmatic purposes and to coordinate among conflicting purposes less than older students. Beginning in older adolescence, females prioritized moral educational purposes more than did males. Race and ethnicity were not significantly related to prioritization and coordination of educational purposes; however, there were significant differences by family income and parent education (two measures of socioeconomic status). College students from higher-income families showed greater preference for HPPersonal purposes, and those whose parents have higher levels of education gave less priority to HCPragmatic items. High school students whose parents have higher levels of education prioritized HPPersonal purposes more and engaged in more coordination of purposes than did students whose parents have lower levels of education.

Many students expressed beliefs that education should address multiple purposes without having them sacrifice personal growth to pursue human capital accumulation (e.g., having to choose between goals of liberal arts and STEM). The students’ preferences and justifications demonstrate a need for pursuit of education for multiple purposes despite a perceived push by educational institutions and policymakers to restrict educational purposes to social status concerns and economic competition.