Alright, time to get all academic on you.

Among the pantheon of great college literature, there is no greater tome than, How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research (2005, Pascarella & Terenzini). This is the aftermath to their seminal book, How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research (1991).

I draw your attention to this book because you will find it on the shelf of every university administrator who has earned a Master's. Basically, the book is a compendium of research studies and their conclusions answering why and how the college experience is important.

Some insights are unvarnished. For instance, one study concludes that hedonism increases. Somebody got paid for that conclusion? Other studies follow the typical patterns expected from Ivory Tower academicians.

A reader review from Amazon, helpful to 6 out of 6 reads: "Pascarella and Terenzini, two of the most cited researchers in higher education, provide a wealth of information on the impact of college on students. Both volumes of How College Affects Students (published in 1991 and 2005, respectively) cover a variety of critically important student outcomes such as, cognitive and intellectual growth, psychosocial change, moral development, and career and economic impacts of college. This book is one of the most cited and well-known works in the fields of higher education and student affairs.

If you want to know about the empirical evidence on important student outcomes, there is no better book to reference. This book does not cover anecdotal conclusions about the impact of college on students - it only reviews what is known scientifically about how college affects students. A MUST READ for all higher education professionals."

So, I draw your attention to the areas mentioned above-cognitive and intellectual growth, psychological change, moral development and career and economic impacts. As you may infer, students grow new modalities of cognition, they become broader thinkers due to exposure to diverse personalities and ideas. They earn more than their counterparts with similar characteristics who did not attend college, and finally, they develop a stronger moral compass with regard to open-mindedness and acceptance of cultural and political differences.

And, again, how does this apply to College Tips? For those of you teetering on purchasing a four-year education for your child, you need to know what you're buying. Certainly, they will earn a degree in some tangible major. But in order to understand the ramifications of diving into the college experience, your child will certainly pop out of the higher education system a different -- probably a better person -- than from whence they entered.

As with most things the devil is in the details. Find this book or its primer from 1991. Take an hour or two to thumb through it. When your child comes home during that first Thanksgiving Break, you will best be able to counter their witticisms and "new" knowledge about how the world works.