ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one aspect of individual differences by asking whether, and how, variations in individual circumstances and characacteristics create variations in the degree and nature of college impacts. Certain demographic characteristics of entering students, such as size and type of home community, size of high school, and social class background, may serve as indicators of the continuity-discontinuity dimension. Entering college students of working class or lower-middle class backgrounds are of course not totally different from other entering students. The methodological difficulties just enumerated may account for the variability of results among studies, but it may also be that the simple discontinuity and incongruence hypotheses are just that: too simple. Current evidence suggests that the more incongruent the student is with his overall college environment, the more likely he is to withdraw from that college or from higher education in general.
