Professor Role Preferences of Entering College Students and Their Parents

Abstract

The entire entering freshman class of a medium-sized Midwestern liberal arts college students were asked to rate the importance of three college professor roles: the teaching role, the research role, and the character-building role. The students rated the teaching role as most important and the research role as least important. The parents assigned equally high ratings to the teaching and character-building roles and lower ratings to the research role. Ratings of character-building function by the parents were significantly higher than those of the student group. The students and parents did not differ significantly in their ratings of the teaching and research roles.