Freshmen Get High Marks--in Apathy

Call them the Disengaged Generation.

America’s new crops of college students continue to be less interested in politics than their predecessors.

It’s not because the class of 2001 is absorbed by academics though, according to the latest installment of the nation’s largest survey of college freshmen.

Fewer college freshmen reported that they spent at least six hours a week hitting the books as high school seniors, and a record 36% said they were frequently bored in class. The number who admitted they “overslept and missed class or an appointment” also reached an all-time high, 34.5%.

“This academic disengagement, and the continuing political disengagement, is really troubling,” said Alexander W. Astin, founding director of the annual survey by UCLA’s High Education Research Institute, to be released today.

Astin noted that voter turnout continues to plummet, especially among the young. “If our best and brightest are going to be even more disengaged, that doesn’t augur well for the future of our government,” he said.

The annual survey, which gathered responses from 252,082 freshmen at 464 institutions, is the nation’s oldest and most comprehensive assessment of student attitudes. Freshmen usually fill out the forms by the first week of classes, outlining their views before they become enmeshed in college life.

Despite the students’ admitted lackadaisical study habits as high school seniors, collegiate ambitions continue to soar. A record 39.4% of freshmen aspire to complete a master’s degree, and more of them than ever--15.3%--say they plan to pursue a doctorate.

But Linda J. Sax, a visiting UCLA professor and this year’s survey director, said the motivation--as it has in recent years--appears to be the pursuit of “academic credentials, rather than a love of learning.”

Graduate schools generally require a minimum of a B average in cumulative college grades, and a record 49.7% of freshmen expected to hit that mark, contrasted with only 32.7% in 1972.

“While students’ level of involvement in their studies is down,” Sax said, “they realize they need to be successful in college in order to remain competitive for graduate school admissions.”

Besides noting academic trends, the survey quizzes students on personal habits. Continuing a decade-long trend, the percentage of freshmen who smoke cigarettes continues to climb.

More than 16% say they smoke frequently, nearly double the 1987 figure of 8.9%. Young women do more puffing than young men, 17.3% to 14.6%.

Surveyors chalk up smoking’s resurgence as an act of youthful rebellion or statement of independence at a time when older Americans have decided to spurn the unhealthful habit.

Support for the legalization of marijuana also continues to grow, as it has throughout the 1990s. More than 35% of freshman agreed with the statement “marijuana should be legalized,” contrasted with 16.7% in 1989. Yet the latest figure is still shy of 1977’s, when more than half of college freshman favored legalizing pot.

And even if the current students are growing more liberal toward marijuana, other survey data indicates they are becoming more conservative on other social issues.

For instance, support for keeping abortion legal fell for a fifth straight year, to 53.5%. Abortion rights supporters still claim the majority, but Astin said this year’s survey results suggest that views on abortion are beginning to swing.

After a decade of growing acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships, freshmen’s responses are showing signs of change there, as well. For a second year in a row, there was an increase in the percentage of freshmen agreeing that “it is important to have laws prohibiting homosexual relationships.” The number condemning such relationships still was a minority--33.9% of the freshmen surveyed.

Yet overall, apathy continues to dominate politics on campus. Most freshmen think of themselves as “middle of the road,” rather than conservative or liberal.

As it has done throughout the 1990s, the number who said it is important to keep abreast of politics dropped, with only 26.7% listing that as a priority. Political interest among freshmen reached a high in 1966, when 57.8% of students tuned in to current affairs.

Students nowadays are less likely to discuss politics than their counterparts even a year earlier. They also report less interest in trying “to influence the political structure.”

“A lot of problems have been presented to our generation as so huge, it’s sort of like, ‘What can we do?’ ” said Marguerite Martel, a UCLA freshman.

That political disengagement is also reflected in diminishing interest in student activism, which had been on the upswing five years earlier. The percentage of students who say that “becoming involved in programs to clean up the environment” is a very important or essential life goal dropped from 33.6% in 1992 to 19.4% this past fall.

Similarly, despite President Clinton’s call for national dialogue on improving race relations, the freshmen’s commitment to “helping promote racial understanding” reached its lowest point in a decade--31.8%, a drop of nearly three percentage points from the previous year.

Astin, who has been tracking such trends for more than three decades, isn’t sure why today’s college freshmen are so apolitical. But he suspects that television and computers have something to do with it.

“It’s the whole electronic thing, the wired society,” he said, “people sitting in front of their screens, playing video games, watching TV. It is encouraging all of us to be independent, isolated individuals. That is going to lead naturally to disengagement.”

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The Disengaged Generation

The nation’s largest annual survey of college freshmen shows that the Class of 2001 has less interest in keeping up with political affairs--and has poorer study habits--than its counterparts in previous years.

* Academic Disengagement

*--*

1987 1997 Bored in class 26.4% 36.0% Overslept and missed class or appointment 30.3% 34.5% Studied or did homework 6+ hours per week 43.7% 33.9%

*--*

*

Political Interest

26.7% in 1997

Source: UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute

Source: UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute