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Using data on upper-division students in the University of California system, we show that two distinct cultures of engagement exist on campus. The culture of engagement in the arts, humanities and social sciences focuses on interaction, participation, and interest in ideas. The culture of engagement in the natural sciences and engineering focuses on improvement of quantitative skills through collaborative study with an eye to rewards in the labor market. The two cultures of engagement are strongly associated with post-graduate degree plans. The findings raise questions about normative conceptions of good educational practices in so far as they are considered to be equally relevant to students in all higher education institutions and all major fields of study.Considerable scholarly and policy attention has been directed toward the improvement of undergraduate education for more than two decades (see, e.g., AAC 1985;Chickering and Gamson 1987). Yet interest appears to have peaked in recent years, as indicated 1 The SERU Project is a collaborative study based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley and focused on developing new types of data and innovative policy relevant scholarly analyses on the academic and civic experience of students at major research universities, One of the main products of the SERU Project has been the development and administration of the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES). For further information on the project, see http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/seru/ Brint, Cantwell, and Hannerman: TWO CULTURES OF ENGAGEMENT 2 CSHE Research & Occasional Paper Series by large-scale improvement efforts at many of the country's leading research universities (see, e.g., Rimer 2007).The most important cause of this heightened interest is the report of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education (also known as the Spellings Commission). The Spellings Commission proposed incentives for the adoption of standardized testing for purposes of making higher education accountable to consumers. In the words of the Commission, "We believe that improved accountability is vital to ensuring the success of all the…reforms we propose…" (Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education 2006: 4).The Commission's recommendations represent what may be the first major salvo in a federal government campaign to bring greater accountability to higher education as a condition of accreditation.The Spellings Commission recommendations build on significant public concerns about the undergraduate experience. Public opinion surveys have shown that concerns about educational quality are common among Americans; nearly half of Americans say that low educational standards are a serious problem in American colleges and universities and support efforts to hold colleges accountable for student learning (ETS 2003). Wellpublicized studies have provided evidence that the college experience is failing as a stimulus to the educational m...

The co-authorship network of scientists represents a prototype of social networks. By mapping the graph containing all relevant publications of members in an international collaboration network: COLLNET, we infer the structural mechanisms that govern the topology of this social system. Structure of the network effect not only individual's collaboration pattern deeply, but knowledge flowing process profoundly. However, a single view is not enough to grasp the characters of the network in details. We have to either produce global view on the structure of the network as a whole, or make a detailed inspection of some features of individuals. In this paper, some techniques for analyzing complex networks (different approaches to identify "interesting" individuals and groups, analysis of internal structure of the main core and hierarchical clustering) and visualizations of their parts are presented on the case of COLLNET collaboration graph.

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