Undergraduate Society and the College Culture

Undergraduate society and its culture constitute a field of study of importance to college officials, sociologists and students themselves. Official college organization is enmeshed with unofficial cultural patterns, and both must be understood in estimating the net educational effect of the modern college. The center of the formative process lies in the informal student friend-group, which can best be studied through the intermediation of student participant observers, supplemented by scrutiny of letters, diaries and other types of fortuitous or controlled life history documents.