Comment by bumby
19 days ago
>went to college to be better citizens of the world and not to get a job?
It depends on the era. The data says they likely did decades ago, and less likely to share that same view now. Around the 1980s the proportions switched: prior, the majority of freshman had a goal of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” compared to “being very well-off financially”. After the 1980s, that proportion inverted to the majority focused on material success.
Because the 1940s onward had a relatively high proportion of students from lower and middle class backgrounds, I don’t think the social class argument has as much explanatory power as you imply. In other words, the differences is that our cultural attitudes about college have likely changed due to other factors.
Edit: edited to soften tone and give more information. The data comes from UCLAs Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) surveys of incoming freshman. https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/
After your link, it still doesn’t show supporting data
You can register to get it through the "Access Data" tab. If you don't want to do that Google "HERI freshman survey". If that's still too much work, click on "Images" to see slides people have put together to summarize the data. You can also search for "The American Freshman: 40 year trends" to get summary reports.
Instead of going through the scavenger hunt, quote the numbers you believe support your viewpoint.
But just looking at one source it says no community colleges were represented and 60 private colleges and 12 public colleges were represented.
That automatically skews the results to more privileged people who can consider it an outlet to “be a better person in the world and mommy and daddy can support me while I get my unpaid internship in NYC and then become a journalist who can’t support myself” over the people who will eventually have to depend on themselves to exchange enough labor for money to support their need for food and shelter.
https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/HERI-TFS-Brief.pdf
Also notice that 80% went to college to get a job. Where is the related statistic that poorer people spent money and time to go to college without the expectations of getting a better job 50 years ago?
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