ABSTRACT
This book is an attempt to assess the evidence about the orientations and characteristics of American college students, as their colleges have influenced them. Our findings, if they are to be comprehensible, must be presented in the context of their relevant backdrops—time, space, and human material—which, although they are themselves complex, have a common theme that preserves their function as background without falsely simplifying our task. That theme is change or development or adaptation—best captured, we believe, by the notion of impact. Hence the title of this book.*
