Freshmen More Aware of Race Relations, Poll Finds

Last year’s racial unrest in Los Angeles left a deep impression on America’s college freshmen, dramatically heightening their concerns about race relations and their determination to work to improve their communities, according to an annual survey being released today.

A survey conducted last summer showed that 42% of the students thought “helping to promote racial understanding” was an “essential” or “very important” goal. That represents an eight-point jump since 1991--one of the largest such increases in the 27-year history of the survey, said survey director Eric L. Dey of the UCLA Graduate School of Education.

“Over the past eight to 10 years, people have been less willing to endorse the goal of promoting racial understanding,” Dey said. “Given the events in Los Angeles, we wondered if we would see polarization, see people pessimistic about the future of race relations. In fact, we were heartened that it went the other way.”

The survey, which asks students dozens of multifaceted questions about their lifestyles, attitudes and backgrounds, is conducted annually by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute and the American Council on Education.

This year the survey found large increases in the numbers of students who said they believed that it was important to “participate in community action” and “become a community leader.” A record two out of three said they had done volunteer work in the last year.

“Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that students today are substantially more committed to serving their communities and to working for social and political change than were students who entered college just a few years ago,” said Alexander W. Astin, UCLA professor of higher education and founding director of the survey.

Curiously, there were no significant differences in responses given by Los Angeles-area students and other students nationwide. There remain, however, dramatic gaps in attitudes between freshmen at all-black colleges and freshmen overall.

While 42% of freshmen overall said they considered the promotion of racial understanding an essential or very important goal, 73% of freshmen attending black colleges thought that way. A third of freshmen overall lent such importance to community leadership, compared to more than half the freshmen at black colleges. About 26% overall said they were determined to participate in community actions, compared to nearly half of the freshmen at black colleges.

Students may be more interested in community activism, but they showed little interest in getting involved in traditional politics.

Though a fourth of all students said they frequently discuss politics--a level equivalent to that recorded in the late 1960s, just 7.3% worked in a local, state or national political campaign in 1992. That is an all-time low; twice that number worked in political campaigns in the late 1960s.

Significant gaps between men’s and women’s attitude remain on some social issues.

One-fourth of all students continued to believe that the activities of married women are “best confined to home and family.” Nearly one in three men agreed with that statement, while only about one in five women concurred.

When it comes to sex between consenting adults, a record low of 44% agreed that “if two people really like each other, it’s all right for them to have sex even if they’ve known each other only for a very short time.” Three years ago, 60% felt that way.

The survey involved questionnaires completed by more than 300,000 freshmen at 606 of the nation’s two-and four-year colleges and universities. The results were statistically adjusted to represent the nation’s total of about 1.7 million freshmen who entered college full time for the first time.