ABSTRACT
The public images of colleges, together with their admission policies, have the consequence that their entering students have distinguishable sets of characteristics. This does not mean that all institutions attract equally homogeneous populations of students; indeed, degree of homogeneity itself may be an important distinguishing variable among colleges. The accentuation processes by which such impact occurs are very similar to those that result in differentiation among colleges. Individuals who elect a particular major in a given institution are not a random assortment of all its students. Campus-wide impact presupposes not only a set of college influences, preponderantly favoring rather than opposing that effect, but also some degree of homogeneity on the part of its entering students. The frequency of transfers from one college to another, from one prospective major to another, and from one residential or peer group to another, suggests that a student’s earliest decisions do not ordinarily result in forms of accentuation that predetermine later choices.
