Lost in student research of the last three decades is the effort to depict and understand the student experience and the students’ role in creating it. That students create a culture or cultures, and that such cultures crystallize collective and individual student identities, has largely disappeared as an identifiable theme in contemporary research on college students. Decades of earlier research on students’ worlds and cultures lead to the inescapable conclusion that student subcultures powerfully mediate efforts designed to encourage specific student behaviors, attitudes, and orientations. We offer a description of the evolution of this earlier body of work and an analysis of why there has been a significant attenuation in interest over the past thirty years. We close by describing a relatively new program of research designed in part to capitalize on this perspective as we argue the importance of renewed attention to an understanding of contemporary student culture.
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Flacks, R., Thomas, S.L. (2007). ‘Outsiders’, Student Subcultures, and the Massification of Higher Education. In: Smart, J.C. (eds) Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5666-6_4
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