As college students move from their first to final year, their belief that their campus should focus on contributing to a larger community is stable and strong, but their assessment of whether their institution actually is focusing on this goal becomes increasingly pessimistic. This is just one of the findings included in the new AAC&U publication, Civic Responsibility: What Is the Campus Climate for Learning?, which will be released this Wednesday, on the eve of the Network for Academic Renewal meeting, Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments, taking place in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The report, which features campus climate data gathered at twenty-three leadership campuses involved in the initiative, Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility, includes responses from 24,000 students, evenly divided over all four years of college. The report notes that nearly 45 percent of first-year students strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. and global social, political, and economic issues, which is critical to take effective action in communities. However, only one-third of seniors felt as strongly that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. issues, and only one-fifth of seniors strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes global issues.

One could speculate different reasons for this drop-off, including the likelihood that seniors have a more realistic understanding of the number and magnitude of social, political, and economic issues that exist in both U.S. and global contexts. A more distressing possibility is that as students move through their major fields of study, fewer of them encounter these issues as part of their coursework. One student, providing qualitative comments in the survey, noted, “Freshman year, there was a required service project during the first week at college [but] other than freshman year, I feel that it’s all simply lip service and no one really gets involved.” Another student said, “If the campus wants to get people involved, they should design activities and help students design their own activities that directly relate to a person’s major and interests.”

AAC&U president Carol Schneider, speaking to a group of faculty and administrators this summer, argued that if education for personal and social responsibility is something that is only “done” in the first year, then students will learn to treat it as they have long treated general education—as something to be “gotten out of the way.” This week, more than 425 conference participants from nearly 200 institutions will gather in Minneapolis to work at sending a new message to students about the continuing importance of education for personal and social responsibility across all of the years that students attend college. I’ll be posting an entry next week about the conference itself, so stay tuned.

Tags: civic engagement, Civic Responsibility, Core Commitments