Educators deny it, but "Grade Inflation" is in.
They also earn higher grades, seemingly with less work.
Survey: Freshmen more political — and more conservative
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
After 35 years of decline, political interest among young people is on the rise, a wide-ranging survey of U.S. college freshmen finds.
Credit the contested 2000 presidential election and 9/11, says Linda Sax of the University of California, Los Angeles, who directs The American Freshman annual survey.
In the newest edition, released today, 34% of freshmen surveyed last fall say it's important to keep up with politics, continuing a three-year uptick that began just months after the Florida recount and weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Until then, interest in politics had been dropping for 35 years.
Sax says it was the 2000 recount that attracted students. "It's not the politicians that interested them, it was the contested election," she says.
The Sept. 11 attacks, she says, taught students that "what used to be considered international affairs ha a real connection on how they live their lives."
Still, modern kids' political engagement pales next to that of the freshmen class of 1966, the survey's first subjects, 60% of whom said it was "essential or very important" to keep up with politics.
Since then, the survey shows, students' political views also have shifted to the right. Liberals still outnumber conservatives, but just barely: 24% say they hold liberal political views; 21% call themselves conservatives.
The percentage of liberals has nose-dived from its high of 38% in 1971. The percentage of conservative students, as low as 14% after Richard Nixon's second presidential inauguration in 1973, has hovered near the 20% mark since 1981 and Ronald Reagan's first term. Then, as now, the largest group by far remained students who call their their political views "middle-of-the-road."
Politics aside, the survey shows that young people's lives have changed a bit since the 1960s:
•A larger proportion of students now say they've recently attended a church service — 80% vs. 69% — but more also say they have no religious preference.
•The percentage of students focused on "being very well off financially" has risen sharply, from 42% in 1966 to 74% in 2003, while the percentage saying it's important to develop "a meaningful philosophy of life" has dropped by more than half, from 86% in 1967 to 39% in 2003.
•45% of students in 2003 say they've drunk beer in the past year, down from 69% in 1966; only 6% say they've smoked cigarettes, down from 15% in 1966.
"It's a more conservative generation," says Paul Houston of the American Association of School Administrators. "They just don't do things that are dangerous to themselves."
They also earn higher grades, seemingly with less work. In 2003, 23% of students said their average grade in high school was an A or A+. In 1966, only 7% of students earned mostly As or A+s.
While statistics for study time go back only to the mid-1980s, students these days seem to study less than their predecessors. In 1987, the first time UCLA researchers asked about work habits, 47% of freshmen said they studied six or more hours in a typical week during their last year of high school. That group has shrunk to 34%.
The 2003 results are based on written responses from 276,449 students at 413 four-year colleges.
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