For more than a half-century, a UCLA-based research group has been carrying out surveys of incoming first-year college students. There are lots of questions about the decision process the students went through in applying, and about their expectations and priorities. The data tables from the 2022 survey, from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, are available here.
I’ll focus here on a single question, which asks about what life objectives are important. The first column shows the overall answer: the other two columns are divided into answers from males and females. (These figures are taken from several different tables: for those who want to dig deeper, the underlying tables offer a number of other breakdowns.)
It’s worth remembering that survey responses are always a mixture of what the person actually believes and what they feel is a desired or appropriate answer. With that noted, it’s interesting to consider some of the gender gaps here. For example, incoming first-year college students who are male are notably more likely to list “raising a family” and “becoming successful in a business of my own” as essential or very important. Females are notably more likely to emphasize “working to achieve greater gender equity,” along with a variety of other social goals like “working to correct economic inequalities,” “working to correct social inequalities,” “improving my understanding of other cultures and countries,” “heling to promote racial understanding,” participating in a community action program,” “keeping up to date in political affairs,” “becoming involved in programs to clean up the environment,” and “helping others who are in difficulty.”
With that difference in mind, it’s interesting “being very well off financially” is by far the highest value for both male and female incoming first-year students (although I’m not sure how the overall average can be lower than it is for males and females taken separately). And it’s interesting that despite the emphasis on social goals in female responses, males are slightly more likely to emphasize the goal of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”
One substantial swing over the decades has been in these two answers concerning “being well-off financially” and “developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Back in the 1985 survey, the reporting of the survey includes this figure. In the 1966 survey, develop a meaningful philosophy of life was a high priority for a much larger share of first-year college students. But priorities shift, the lines cross in the late 1970s, and by the 1980s “be financially very well off” is well in the lead.
What’s going on here? Here are some thoughts and reactions
1) One reason is a dramatic shift in the gender mix. Back in the 1966 survey, only 31.6% of females listed “be financially very well off” as a top priority, compared with 54.1% of men.
2) The US economy suffered “stagflation” of high inflation and unemployment in the 1970s, which probably made financial concerns more salient. In recent decades, the Great Recession and the pandemic recession have kept financial concerns salient.
3) The cost of higher education has risen dramatically. As I’ve pointed out in the past, when I was thinking about college in the late 1970s, I had a lot of friends attending the big local state university–in my case, the University of Minnesota. At that time, it was possible to cover all of U of M tuition and a share of living expenses by working at a minimum-wage job full-time over the summer and 10 hours/week during school. That’s no longer even close to true at the University of Minnesota, much less at the pricier private colleges and universities. When college and universities have a high price, students are going to become more focused on financial goals.
4) The share of high school students who go immediately to a post-secondary program in the next year was around 45% in the 1960s. Before the pandemic, it had reached nearly 70%, before dropping off. My guess is that a substantial share of this expansion of enrollment was from people who were more interested in economic goals than in a “meaningful philosophy of life.”
5) The priorities of students will shape the intellectual climate of a college or university.
6) It’s interesting to me that the survey question doesn’t just ask about being “well-off,” but about being “very well-off.” There will be a distribution of economic outcomes. Perhaps being in the middle of that distribution–say, from the 40th to the 60th percentile–can be counted as “well-off.” But when people talk about being “very well-off,” it seems to me that they are thinking about being in the upper reaches of economic outcomes. It is statistically not possible for all college students to end up in the upper reaches of economic outcomes. Developing a philosophy of life that you find meaningful is possible for everyone; in contrast, making 85% of college and university students very well-off is statistically impossible.
