Data from College and Beyond II help show the lasting impact of a liberal arts education on alumni civic engagement

Source citation:

With longitudinal data from the series, College & Beyond II (CBII), authors Mou and Mitic were able to link students’ college experiences with their post-graduation behaviors to better understand which specific aspects of a liberal arts education help students become socially responsible, engaged citizens. The CBII’s purpose was to better understand how students’ undergraduate experiences in and out of the classroom relate to their long-run development. It contains administrative records from nearly 25,000 students at seven public universities, who had completed a four-year degree in 2009-2010. It also includes an alumni survey that a subset of those students completed in 2021, detailing outcomes associated with their health and well-being, civic and democratic engagement, and openness to diversity. Mou and Mitic used an analytic sample of 2,751 of them and found that college participation in extracurricular activities, diversity-focused courses, and service organizations, as well as cultivating a sense of belonging, were key factors linked to active civic and democratic engagement a decade after graduation. Mou and Mitic accessed restricted-use CBII data from the ICPSR Member Archive. More publications that use data from studies in the CBII series can be found here.

Posted May 28, 2026

Note: Current Events in the Bib are brief summaries of journal articles or other works that investigate topics currently in the news or trending in the social or behavioral health sciences. These works do not represent ICPSR’s point of view. They contain others’ findings based at least in part on their analysis of data available at ICPSR. Thousands of other works that analyze data available at ICPSR can be found in the searchable database, the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature.