All is not lost: an early look at the class of '96 - survey of college freshmen - Cover Story

"The strongest signal yet of the passing of the decade of greed--and a hint that the '60s-style social activism is on the rise"; the Boston Globe's education reporter, Anthony Flint, had been sifting through a statistical treasure house. It is the annual study of college freshmen that has been compiled for the last twenty-seven years by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. This year's study of college freshmen provides us with a snapshot of attitudes, plans, backgrounds, and opinions based on a survey of 213,630 entering freshmen, statistically adjusted to represent the 1.7 million young people who entered college in the fall of 1992. Flint, along with other commentators, noted a growing social awareness among this year's freshmen. For example, when asked if they agree with the statement that "racial discrimination is no longer a major problem in America," 85.1 percent disagree, up from 79.1 percent of last year's freshman class.

For those of us serving in the church's ministries to higher education, the UCLA study also suggests that we may have a much more receptive audience among college students than we have imagined.

A closer took at the study (The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 13, 1993), yields some very interesting, if less publicized, insights into the religious identity and religious values of today's freshmen. When asked to name their current religious preference (italics mine), 30.5 percent identify themselves as Roman Catholic, indicating that Catholics, usually estimated at 22 per cent of the U.S. population, are over-represented. What makes that 30.5 percent noteworthy is that students themselves, and not their parents, were asked. In other words, they're self-identified Catholics. They also form the largest religious group among freshmen, followed by Baptists at 19.3 percent. "None" ranks third as a religious preference, with Methodists in fourth place (8.8 percent).

A major and frequently neglected religious demographic emerges in response to another question: "Are you a born-again Christian?" Almost a third, 31.7 percent, say they are. While little ambiguity was permitted by this question with its direct yes or no answer, the numbers suggest that the appeal of born-again Christianity cannot be treated as a transitory fad in American religious life.

That such a large number would claim affiliation with either Catholicism or born-again Christianity--the two most controversial and certainly the least politically correct religious groups in America today---constitutes a first point of reflection: Religious groups that offer a countercultural alternative to the dominant, highly seculanzed culture are exactly those religious options which attract the largest numbers and the greatest participation. The numbers in this study of college freshmen are yet another indication of the superficiality of seculanst analysis that holds that the role of religion is in great decline and that the future belongs to those religious traditions that make the greatest accommodations to the prevailing culture.

Born-again Christianity and Catholicism arrive at their encounters with modernity from different histories and employ largely incompatible theological methods. Even so, both are at odds with some aspects of American society, propelling them into the center of several current controversies, some of them considered beyond the need of argument: complete personal privacy and freedom, the divorce of public law from the reach of traditional morality, tolerance of all manner of diversity (except that which questions the dominant culture), and the relegation of most individual or personal morality to a private, and irrelevant, sphere.

Abortion alone illustrates the substance and climate of current controversy. It would be both foolish and inaccurate to assume that every freshman who identifies as a born-again Christian or as a Catholic fully subscribes to that tradition's stance on abortion. Elsewhere in the study, 64.1 percent of all freshmen favor legal abortion. (The question as asked does not, as is often the case, make further inquiry into various levels of restriction on abortion as, for example, spousal notification, which will usually produce very different results.) But clearly any freshman admitted to college will at least know that these two religious traditions strongly oppose abortion. Nevertheless, approximately 60 percent of this year's freshmen are not thereby deterred from identifying themselves with one of the two traditions.

The UCLA-sponsored study also provides other interesting data. When asked about "objectives they considered essential or very important," 73 percent of the freshmen cite "being well-off financially." A close second is "raising a family" (70.6). The numerical closeness of these two objectives suggests that many who chose financial well-being as their objective joined it with their desire to provide well for their future families. This counters another stereotype of the young, that the selfish college grad wants to make money only for his or her own indulgence. As with the issue of religious identity, most observers of the college scene should find some cause here for surprise. Raising a family is simply not something you hear much about on campus or among the topics of hot seminars. When was the last time anyone saw a campus poster advertising a speaker or program on the topic of raising a family? Much more likely will be speakers and programs offering enlightenment about the oppressive nature of the family, or its obsolescence, or the need to cultivate alternatives to family life.

The high value given to raising a family might not surprise so much had we realized that, as the study also informs us, fully 70.9 percent of the 1992 freshmen have parents who live together, with 24.2 percent of their parents divorced or separated and an additional 4.9 with one or both parents deceased. Assumptions often made about the divorce rate being closer to 50 percent may have some statistical warrant but not apparently among the parents of college freshmen. Many college administrators and campus ministers (myself included) would have estimated the percentage of students with divorced parents at a much higher figure and, of course, that may well be the case at some schools and in certain parts of the country. Overall, however, the strong majority of freshmen nationwide will not have experienced the kind of family breakup on which many of their college courses will be focused and which is routinely depicted in the media as commonplace.

Another insight into the lives of these young people can be gleaned from a question that asked about their activities in the past year. The second highest score, 84 percent, was registered when they were asked if they had "attended a religious service" during the past year.

We do not know precisely what kind of services or how frequently the 84 percent attended religious services. Some no doubt attended weekly, perhaps at their parents' insistence, others may have qualified for a yes answer by their presence at a family funeral or wedding, while many will surely be somewhere in between. But even if we adopt the cynic's viewpoint and attribute the high response to a lot of one-time weddings and funerals, it is clear that over four out of five freshmen come from families that continue to celebrate these rites of passage in religious ceremonies. The great majority of freshmen are still connected, either personally or through their families, with communities of faith.

A freshman class in which, during the preceding year, only 9.1 percent say they regularly felt depressed, and only 24.6 say they regularly discussed politics, and only 22.4 percent regularly discussed safe sex, while 84 percent attended a religious service, raises doubts about the prospect of a strongly secularized and alienated future. Other views caught by the survey tend to reinforce skepticism of the usual stereotypes of young people. For example, 44.2 percent think its all right for two people who really like each other to have sex even when they have only known each other a short time. Most observers I know would have estimated that figure at about 90 percent. All would be surprised to see the dramatic gender gap in this response: 58.8 percent of the men thought such sex was fine but only 31.9 percent of the women agreed. If the patriarchal tradition which permitted men to think they had a sexual license denied to women has been overthrown by the sexual revolution, the class of 1992 offers meager evidence of such a turnaround in attitudes.

Far from fulfilling the image of an ever-increasing permissiveness with regard to behavior, freshmen think too much concern is shown in the courts for the rights of criminals, support the death penalty and the criminalization of marijuana, feel employers should be allowed to require mandatory drug tests from their employees, and are convinced that the best way to control AIDS is through widespread, mandatory testing. They do not think students from disadvantaged social backgrounds should be given preferential treatment in college admissions. Nor are they open to having the federal government raise taxes to reduce the deficit. On the other hand, they do think that there should be no laws prohibiting homosexual relationships, that national health care should be provided for all, that the government should do more to control handguns, and, as mentioned earlier, that abortion should remain legal.

The portrait of the freshman class that emerges from these numbers is one of independent-minded young people, unfettered by the party line of either the Right or the Left. Less than 2 percent expect to major in history and English, departments where the culture wars have been most in evidence. The fields of study to which more than 2 percent aspire are biology, accounting, business, management, education (elementary and secondary), engineering, premed, predental, preveterinary, communications, and law enforcement. The field of study, other than undecided, which draws the highest response, with 6.2 percent, is nursing. Even allowing for the predictable shifts in their career plans, it seems safe to say that most of the class of 1996 will move through their college years with only a peripheral awareness of the raging debates over political correctness, multiculturalism, race, class, and gender.

The church, like publishers and the mass media, is susceptible to theories that illustrate the alienation, secularization, and cultural radicalism of the young. Some in the church wring their hands over the inroads of evangelical and/or fundamentalist groups among young Catholics, others resign themselves to the perceived estrangement of the young from religious practice. There are vivid and numerous anecdotes of both phenomena. I think that both these readings are fundamentally inaccurate.

When our culture's contentious disparities jell around religious differences, secularism is often promoted as a form of peace-making. But now that strategy has itself become rigid and doctrinaire. The appeal of a secularist solution endured for years until many among the religiously committed came to understand that, far from being a modus vivendi among religious viewpoints, secularism had become the nemesis of religion. One approach, undertaken by some now declining mainline religious traditions, was to embrace secularity as a kind of neorevelation and to make the appropriate moral and doctrinal adjustments to its requirements.

How the Catholic church calibrates its history-laden proclamation of the gospel to a dismantled American harmony poses one of the most interesting religious questions of our time. Whether this is the "Catholic Moment" or the "Moment of Catholic Irrelevance" is a quandary without apparent resolution. Some elements of that outcome are already contained in our reading of the "the signs of the times" as these are revealed in the lives and thoughts of young people.

The results of the UCLA study of freshman class of 1992--the assumed secularization of young people does not show up in its responses--should alert us to an error that may be embedded across the entire spectrum of our current readings of the "signs of the times." Young people are, in large numbers, rooted in religious tradition and, if theft understanding and knowledge are deficient, they have nonetheless remained attached to the identity and values of their religious communities. To reach and serve them, we need to discard many of the commonly accepted filters we use to hear and to see them. We are not reaching out entirely to strangers and aliens but more likely to young people who have their own reasons to hear us out. Parents, campus ministers, and other committed adults are not whistling in the wind. We do have an audience, a young one, already sending out signals that it verges on being receptive.

MICHAEL J. HUNT, a Paulist priest, is the Catholic chaplain at Tuffs University and the author of the recently published College Catholics: A New Counterculture (Paulist Press).

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