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Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA Linda Sax is Associate Professor at UCLA, Director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), and Associate Director of Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA. Dr. Sax is responsible for CIRP's annual survey of incoming freshmen, as well as an annual survey of continuing college students, and a triennial survey of college faculty. Currently, she is directing a new nationwide survey of students at the end of the first year of college ("Your First College Year"), a project conducted in collaboration with the Policy Center on the First Year of College. I am pleased to be here to discuss the recent and ongoing work that the Higher Education Research Institute has conducted on values and character development among college students. Today I’m going to focus on two major streams of research that define much of HERI’s work throughout the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. Our efforts to study citizenship over the past decade, and now spirituality in the present decade, have relied to a great extent on longitudinal data collected by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP). Before discussing our research findings, it is necessary to first provide a brief overview of our survey program. The CIRP was initiated in 1966 by Alexander Astin (better known as Sandy Astin). Sandy remains intimately involved in the CIRP but handed oversight of the program to me six years ago. The CIRP conducts 3 annual surveys of college students. The Freshman Survey has been conducted each Fall for the past 37 years and is currently administered to over 400,000 freshmen entering approximately 700 colleges and universities nationwide. The survey asks questions about students’ background characteristics, attitudes, values, educational and career goals, reasons for college, self-ratings, etc. Many of the questions related to civic and moral values are repeated on our two surveys of currently enrolled college students (CSS and YFCY). Because these student surveys are designed for longitudinal administration, institutions that use the CSS or the YFCY to follow-up on their Freshman Survey respondents are able to study how students’ values and sense of citizenship change during the college years. Further, because these surveys collect a wide variety of data on students’ experiences and behaviors during college, colleges are able to assess which aspects of the college experience are most or least effective in promoting students’ civic, moral, and spiritual development. Further, we at HERI are able to use the national data collected by these surveys to study how student development varies across different types of institutions. In addition to the regular cycle of CIRP surveys, we occasionally conduct other follow-up surveys that focus on specific topical areas (such as post-college outcomes, civic engagement, and spirituality). I will address some of these later in my talk. I want to begin by describing a handful of trends that illuminate some of the value shifts we have seen among recent cohorts of entering freshmen. Let us start with politics. One of the most consistent and dramatic trends in the history of the survey is students’ declining interest in politics. Over the past three decades, the percent of students who frequently discuss politics or express a commitment to keeping up with politics has been cut in half. This pattern of decline has been fairly steady with the exception of occasional spikes in election years. Recently, however, these trends show signs of reversing themselves, with students’ commitment to “keeping up to date with political affairs” growing for the past two years. Currently, 33 percent of freshmen view keeping up with politics as a “very important” or “essential” life goal, compared with 31 percent last year and an all-time low of 28 percent in 2000. While the current rate of political interest remains far lower than the 60 percent reported in the late 1960’s, this recent reversal likely reflects two events that have re-ignited students’ interest in politics: the hotly-contested 2000 presidential election and the events of September 11, 2001. (It is worth noting that the 2001 CIRP Freshman Survey was administered just prior to the events of September 11; therefore, the 2002 survey served as our first opportunity to consider how those events might have affected students.) Another political item which shows signs of reversing itself is the students’ commitment to influencing the political structure. Students rate this goal even lower than they do keeping up to date with politics, but again we see a dramatic decline throughout the 1990s reversing itself in the direction of increased commitment to politics in the 2000s. The next few slides point to some interesting contradictions. First, over the past decade we have witnessed a steady increase in the proportion of students participating in volunteer work. Currently, a record high 83 percent of freshmen report performing volunteer work during the year prior to entering college, compared to a low of 66 percent in 1989. Given the general decline in political interest during most of the same time period, this trend toward service has been fascinating. Through the research we have conducted on service participation, and through more informal interactions with undergraduates, we have had the opportunity to ask students about this seemingly contradictory trend. Students tell us that they feel relatively disconnected from the political issues of the day, and powerless in their ability to effect change at the broad political level. However, they do feel empowered to make a difference in their local communities by getting involved in service activities through their schools, religious groups, or other organizations. Further, students today have greater opportunities to get involved in service due to an increasing number of state and federally-funded service programs as well as service learning opportunities available at the elementary and secondary levels. While the increase in service participation has also been attributed to the growing number of secondary schools that are requiring students to perform community service, in fact only 29 percent of entering college students attended a high school that required students to conduct service. Despite students’ increasing involvement in volunteerism and service to their communities, trends in the long-term goals of entering freshmen suggest a declining commitment to social activism. Three of these indicators—commitment to cleaning up the environment, participating in community action programs, and promoting racial understanding—have all declined steadily over the past decade, following their peak in 1992, although the latter item seems to have leveled off in recent years. Now that we’ve had a chance to look at some of the long-term trends related to civic values and behaviors, I’d like to turn to how these student characteristics change during college as well as in the years after college. The data I used for this research come from three surveys of students over a nine-year period. Through funding from the National Science Foundation, the Exxon Education Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, we were able to amass three-time point data on over 12,000 students at just over 200 four-year colleges and universities. These students completed the CIRP Freshman Survey in 1985 and were followed-up four years and then nine years after college entry. The 1989 follow-up survey (similar in design to our current College Student Survey) includes information on students’ college experiences, their perceptions of college, as well as post-tests of many of the items that appeared on the 1985 freshman survey. The nine-year follow-up survey, conducted in 1994, provides information on graduate school and early career experiences, involvement in community service/volunteerism, as well as post-test data on many of the attitudinal and behavioral items appearing on the 1985 and 1989 surveys. For today, I’d like to discuss our findings with respect to three outcome areas. The first, Commitment to Social Activism, is defined in terms of the personal importance the student assigns to each of the following life goals: participating in community action programs, helping others who are in difficulty, influencing social values, and influencing the political structure. The second outcome is Sense of Empowerment, which is derived from students’ level of disagreement with the statement, “Realistically, an individual can do little to bring about changes in our society.” Students who disagree with this item (i.e., are more “empowered”) can be seen as exhibiting greater potential for involvement in civic life. Finally, Community Involvement is a behavioral measure reflecting the number of hours per week respondents report engaging in “volunteer work/community service” during the past year. Let’s look first at how the components of the social activism measure change during and after college. As prior research on college student development has shown, students’ commitment to helping others in difficulty increases markedly during college. However, research is typically not able to assess whether such gains last beyond the college years, or whether they are just temporary. As our post-college data indicate, most of the gains in this item experienced during the college years are lost in the years after college. Similar changes occur for two of the other social activist goals: to participate in a community action program and to influence the political structure. Students show substantial increases in both of these goals over the four years after entering college, and in both cases the gains almost entirely disappear in the years after college. However, there is one measure of social activism for which gains made during the college years are retained in the years after: the commitment to influencing social values. In this case, the dramatic increase in students’ commitment to this goal observed during the college years (an increase from 28 percent to 46 percent) is followed by a trivial post-college decline of only 1 percent. The second broad outcome area, sense of empowerment, exhibits very little change during the nine-years after college entry. Whether they are surveyed at the start college, towards the end of college, or a full nine years after entering college, roughly two-thirds of students believe “somewhat” or “strongly” that an individual has the ability to change society. Therefore, unlike commitment to social activism, which grows significantly during college, students’ confidence in their ability to make actual changes in society appears largely unchanged during college and the years after. Turning now to our behavioral measure of citizenship, community involvement, we see that involvement in volunteer work is greatest during high school, and then drops off precipitously during college. Indeed, our work has shown that the pool of volunteers changes dramatically from high school to college and that volunteerism is very much situationally determined (often dependent on specific course requirements, involvement in religious organizations or student groups). In the post-college years, we see a modest return to volunteerism, but the level does not come close to approaching the rate of service participation among students in high school. The fluctuation in rates of volunteerism lead to the question of how much the pool of volunteers actually changes over time. This next slide illustrates the issue of “consistency” by showing the relationship between prior volunteer experience and volunteerism conducted during and after college. While having been a volunteer in the past increases one’s likelihood of volunteering again in the future, there is also a high degree of inconsistency in the volunteer force. Many students who volunteer at one time choose not to volunteer later. For example, among volunteers in high school, only 2 in 5 participate in volunteer work in college and only 1 in 2 engage in service in the post-college years. These rates are only slightly higher than the rates of service among students who never engaged in volunteer work in high school. Similarly, 1 in 2 students who volunteered during college (regardless of high school volunteerism) engaged in service after college, compared to 1 in 3 among those who performed no volunteer work in college. This marked disappearance of much of the volunteer force suggests that the habits of volunteerism that are fostered in high school and in college are very unstable over time. The findings I have discussed thus far describe the ways in which students’ civic values and behaviors change during and after college, but now I’d like to focus on what we have learned about why such changes occur. In particular, how are the post-college outcomes of Social Activism, Sense of Empowerment, and Community Involvement affected by what happens to students during the college years? How are these outcomes influenced by characteristics of institutions, faculty, and peer groups? What role is played by students’ place of residence, choice of major, and various forms of involvement? Before I discuss those results, I want to point out that in these analyses of college impact, we have used Freshman Survey variables to account for students’ pre-college propensity towards social activism, volunteer work, etc. In other words, the results I’m presenting here reflect the net effects of college once these predisposing factors have been controlled. Let’s look first at how college affects students’ commitment to social activism in the years after college. Among characteristics of the college environment, two appear to be particularly influential. First is the positive effect of a commitment to social activism among the student body at the institution. This suggests that regardless of students’ pre-college commitment to social activist goals such as helping others in difficulty and influencing the political structure, they tend to become even more committed to these goals if they attend a college where other students espouse a social activist mentality. The second environmental influence on students’ commitment to social activism is the negative effect of majoring in engineering. Students who major in engineering are less likely to develop a personal commitment to social activism. This effect is consistent with work by Sandy Astin showing that majoring in engineering is associated with increases in materialism and conservatism and declines in concern for the larger society. Findings in the present study suggest that these deleterious effects of engineering persist in the years after college. Additional effects on the commitment to social activism include the positive effects of time spent performing volunteer work, attending religious services, attending class, and exercising or playing sports. Students who spend more time watching television, on the other hand, are less likely to develop social activist tendencies. This latter finding is also consistent with other HERI research showing that more frequent television viewing is associated with the development of materialistic values and a decline in concern for the well being of others. Now let’s turn to the second outcome area--sense of empowerment. We find that the socioeconomic level of the student’s peer group has a positive effect on students’ post-college sense of empowerment. In other words, attending a college that enrolls students from wealthier and more highly educated families tends to promote the belief that individuals have the ability to change society. Students’ sense of empowerment is also positively influenced by several measures of involvement, including: socializing with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, discussing political and social issues, and attending religious services. Conversely, declines in empowerment result from feeling depressed while in college as well as by the perception that college administrators do not care about student concerns. With respect to the behavioral measure of citizenship--community involvement--only one measure of the college environment has a significant influence: the commitment to social activism among the students’ peers. In other words, attending a college where other students are highly committed to social activism tends to encourage students’ own involvement in their communities in the years after college. Several measures of student involvement during college appear to promote post-college volunteerism: performing volunteer work, attending religious services, attending racial/cultural awareness workshops, socializing with students of different racial/ethnic groups, talking with faculty outside class, and working full-time. Together, these measures reflect the critical role of personal interactions in the development of civic consciousness, either with students, faculty, co-workers, or employers. To summarize, among the many different aspects of the college experience that serve to influence students’ civic development, three stand out as being particularly effective. First is the effect of performing volunteer work during the college years, which enhances students’ commitment to social activism and involvement in the community after college. Clearly, forming a habit of volunteerism is critical to the long-term development of citizenship. Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, the pool of volunteers changes dramatically from high school to college, and again from college to the years after. Together, these findings suggest that in order to build and maintain a pool of volunteers, efforts to promote volunteerism in college should focus as much on retention as they do on recruitment. Second is the amount of time students spend in religious services or meetings, which positively influences all three citizenship outcomes. The role of religious involvement is not surprising, given the emphasis on altruism and philanthropy inherent in most religions. We plan to learn much more about the role of religious involvement in some of our current research, which I will get to momentarily. A third common theme influencing citizenship development is socializing with students from different racial/ethnic groups, which influenced both the sense of empowerment as well as students’ involvement in their communities after college. Further, attending racial/cultural awareness workshops also enhanced students’ likelihood of community involvement. While positive effects of “diversity” activities have been reported in studies of students over four years of college, these results suggest that interacting with and learning from people different from oneself have effects that last beyond the college years. Now that I’ve given you a taste of our research over the past decade on the topic of citizenship, I’d like to provide a brief introduction to our newest initiative: the study of student spirituality. These two strands of research are certainly connected, however, since students’ commitment to community and citizenship very much depend on their own sense of meaning and purpose in life. This new project is titled, “ Spirituality in Higher Education: A National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose.” This project is directed by Sandy and Lena Astin and is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Arthur Schwartz, Vice President of the Templeton Foundation, will be discussing the broader purpose of this project with you this evening, so what I’d like to do is provide you some of the basic details of this project and how it fits in with the other surveys we conduct at HERI. The project’s basic goal is to understand where students are in their spiritual development and the ways in which their educational experiences can facilitate that development. Here are some of the main research questions guiding the study:
We are all very excited about this project and are happy to receive questions for more information. However, since I am not directly involved in that project, other than as director of the CIRP, let me give you some additional contact information. The primary contact at HERI is Dr. Jennifer Lindholm (information on slide). Or, while you are here at the conference, you may also direct inquiries to Arthur Schwartz of the Templeton Foundation who will be here for the remainder of the conference. Now I’d like to open it up for any questions that you may have, and I want to thank you for the opportunity to share some of the work in which we have been engaged at UCLA with the invaluable help of our participating colleges nationwide. Thank you. Please click here to view Dr. Sax's PowerPoint presentation. (The presentation is saved in PDF format and you will need Acrobat Reader to view the file. If you do not have an Acrobat Reader, please visit http://www.acrobat.com to downlad the free program. Footnote (1) Some portions of this talk have been excerpted from Sax, L. J. (2000). Citizenship Development and the American College Student. Chapter in T. Ehrlich (Ed.), Higher Education and Civic Responsibility, Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, and Sax, L.J. (forthcoming). An Emerging Generation of College Students. About Campus. References Astin, A.W. and Astin, H.S. (1999). Meaning and Spirituality in the Lives of College Faculty: A Study of Values, Authenticity, and Stress. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA. Astin, H.S., and Antonio, A.L. (2000). "Character Enhancing Colleges” in About Campus. Astin, H.S., and Antonio, A.L. (1999). "The Impact of College on Character Development.” A Report to the John Templeton Foundation. Astin, A. W., Sax, L. J., & Avalos, J. (1999). The Long-Term Effects of Volunteerism During the Undergraduate Years. The Review of Higher Education, 21 (2): 187-202. Astin, A. W. & Sax, L. J. (1998). How Undergraduates are Affected by Service Participation. The Journal of College Student Development, 39 (3): 251-263. Sax, L. J. & Astin, A. W. (1997). The Benefits of Service: Evidence from Undergraduates. Educational Record, Summer/Fall: 25-32. Sax, L. J. (2000). Citizenship Development and the American College Student. Chapter in T. Ehrlich (Ed.), Higher Education and Civic Responsibility, Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press. Sax, L. J. & Astin, A. W. (1997). The Development of “Civic Virtue” Among College Students. Pp. 131-151 in J. Gardner & G. Van der Veer (Eds.), The Senior Year Experience: Facilitating Integration, Reflection, Closure, and Transition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. |
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