The River Pilots are at it again. And they are as confused as ever.1 Their latest endeavor, Taming the River (River III, 2009), offers a detailed analysis of the results of two sets of questionnaires given to a representative sample of college students at twenty-eight selective colleges and universities who matriculated as freshmen in the fall of 1999. Like their earlier work, The Source of the River (River II, 2003), which examined the achievement of these same students to the midpoint of their freshman year, this newest installment looks at a blinding complexity of student characteristics and attitudes and their relationship to various outcome variables including school retention and student grades traced further on into the students’ college life.
This ongoing longitudinal study was inspired by The Shape of the River(River I, 1998), written by former Princeton president
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