Advocate Online

They're Talking On Campus. . .

...About students becoming more caring, more interested in spirituality, and more politically liberal by their junior year of college.

“Spirituality in Higher Education,” a project conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California Los  Angeles, finds that a higher percentage of juniors surveyed this year (50.4 percent) believed that “integrating spirituality” into their lives was very important or essential, compared with 41.8 percent in a 2004 survey of freshmen.

Students also moved left politically during that period, with 34.3 percent of juniors identifying themselves as liberal/far left, compared to 28.6 percent of the freshman group.

There’s little to fear, though. According to Alexander W. Astin, a co-principal investigator of the project, “The long-term effects on political identification pretty much wash out after college, and students go back to where they started.”

More information about the study can be found at http://spirituality.ucla.edu/news/.

... About a finding that the United States now ranks 10th among industrialized nations in the percentage  of 25-34 year olds with an associate’s degree or higher. The U.S. is also one of the only nations where older adults are more educated than younger adults.

In addition, data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that the United States ranks near the bottom of industrialized nations in the percentage of entering students that complete a degree program.