Mixed Portrait of Freshman Political Views: Their beliefs may lean liberal, but their politics tell a different story
January 27, 2012
The Chronicle Of Higher Education:
New research reveals that college freshmen hold increasingly liberal views on key social issues like same-sex marriage and rights for illegal immigrants. But the progressive viewpoints haven’t translated into significantly greater levels of activism or heightened enthusiasm for national politics.
Those findings, published Thursday in an annual survey from the University of California at Los Angeles, paint a complicated election-year portrait of the country’s newest prospective voters. Are they progressive-minded and eager to embrace more-tolerant social views? Are they cynical products of a sour economy and a fractious political era, bent on punishing the establishment by staying home on Election Day? Or are they simply more inclined to favor civic engagement on a local level—volunteering in their communities, say—over national politics?
Or are they all of the above?
The research, done each year by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, along with other recent reports, provides some clarity, but only to a point. Consider these trends: In 1997, the year that UCLA researchers first began asking freshmen for their views on same-sex marriage, slightly more than half of all respondents said they supported it. In the latest survey, that percentage had reached an all-time high of 71 percent. (For more on how students’ views on social issues have changed over time, see related charts.)
Other findings from this year’s survey point to whether students act on those political beliefs.
Ten percent of respondents said they had worked on a local, state, or national campaign during the past year, placing them on the low end of a figure that has fluctuated between 8 and 15 percent over the past four decades.
At a time when angst over student debt and demonstrations linked to the Occupy movement have ignited some campuses, only 6 percent of respondents said they anticipated taking part in student protests while in college. (In the late 1960s, those numbers were, perhaps surprisingly, even lower: In 1968, 5 percent of respondents said they planned to take part in protests. The figure has never topped 9 percent.)
Numbers, of course, tell only part of the story. For every statistic that portends an apathetic future for today’s young voters, there is a student whose behavior augurs something quite different.
“I used to hate politics like crazy,” says Kavita Singh, the founder and lone member—so far—of the Youth for Ron Paul chapter at Southwestern University, in Texas. Growing up in a conservative Indian family in California’s left-leaning Bay Area, Ms. Singh said her view on politics during her early high-school years was simple: “What does it matter?”
“But I eventually I got into it,” she recalls. By the time she arrived at Southwestern in the fall of 2010, Ms. Singh, who is now 19 and majoring in economics, was a self-proclaimed libertarian.
She soon joined the campus’s libertarian group, did a marketing internship for a school-choice organization, and last month worked remotely to register voters for Ron Paul’s campaign in Louisiana. This semester, she is attempting to drum up support for Representative Paul on Southwestern’s tightly knit campus of 1,400 or so students.
In doing so, Ms. Singh has unwittingly acquired a reputation on campus as “the Libertarian.”
“People have been just very curious about me as a person,” she says. “They come up to me and they say, ‘You’re a woman and you’re not white and you’re not a racist or a bigot, so why are you a libertarian? Why do you believe what you believe?”
‘Politics Is Personal’
It’s a question that presidential candidates might well consider as they battle their way toward November. The recent research on freshmen, for starters, could provide hints on how to recapture the youthful vigor that defined the 2008 race.
Most freshmen responding to the UCLA survey will be eligible to vote for the first time in the forthcoming election. And they appear to have different views from arriving students in the past, says John H. Pryor, the report’s lead author
“What might be a more polarizing issue among the general population might not be polarizing for this population,” he says. “So even though more people are espousing these liberal views, they’re not necessarily thinking, ‘OK, I have this liberal view, therefore I’m a liberal.’”
Indeed, many of the hot-button social and political issues the survey asked students about yielded responses that lean liberal. Yet there have been no major shifts in the percentages of students who identify themselves as liberal or conservative.
The proportion who viewed themselves as “liberal” has varied from a high of 38 percent, in 1971 to a low of 19 percent, in 1981; in the newest survey, it was about 28 percent. “Conservative” students, who constitute about 21 percent of the 2011 respondents, have seen their representation fluctuate from 14 percent in the early 1970s to 24 percent in 2006.
Most students, it is clear, see themselves as someplace in between: In the survey’s 45-year history, the largest proportion of students have consistently characterized their views as “middle of the road.” (In the latest survey, 47 percent do.)…
