What Do Students Learn In Higher Education? Toward a Sociological Understanding of Learning Outcomes

Despite decades of policy attention to higher education quality and extensive research on student outcomes, a consolidated understanding of what students actually learn during their undergraduate years remains elusive. Learning outcomes have been assessed through a wide range of indicators, including graduation rates, labor market performance, student satisfaction, and standardized assessments of disciplinary knowledge and generic skills. While each of these measures captures an important dimension of higher education, these measures are rarely integrated, and their interrelationships remain unclear. As a result, we still lack a coherent picture of what students concretely know and can do upon completing their undergraduate studies, and of the social processes that shape such acquisition.

Against this background, this session invites sociological contributions that examine what students learn in higher education, how learning outcomes are conceptualized and measured, and through what educational and social processes knowledge and skills acquired. We are particularly interested in research that clarifies the mechanisms through which learning occurs and explores how different indicators capture distinct dimensions of learning. A central concern of the session is the social distribution of learning outcomes. We encourage contributions that investigate how learning varies across students from different social backgrounds, fields of study, institutional settings, and national contexts, and how such differences are produced and reproduced.

By bringing together diverse approaches to the study of learning outcomes, this session aims to advance a more integrated sociological understanding of what universities teach, what students learn, and how learning can be meaningfully assessed.