4-13-07 Freshmen at Four-Year Colleges

Volume 20 For Publication Date: April 13, 2007 No. 8

Freshmen at Four-Year Colleges

College freshmen are more financially advantaged than they have been in the last 35 years. Based on the national average, they come from families with a 60% higher income, according to data released by UCLA’s national survey on first-time college freshmen at four-year colleges.

The report, “American Freshmen: Forty-Year Trends 1966-2006,” released by the university the week of April 9, 2007, documents the changing dynamics, trends, values, and characteristics of college freshmen across the country. The report is part of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

The report was broken down into four categories: academic preparation for college-level work, attitudes concerning diversity, student values, and reasons for going to college. In terms of college preparedness, high school students taking college preparation courses has increased since 1984. Yet the number of students reporting a need for remedial work has also increased. Despite the effect of the No Child Left Behind initiative, state interest in removing remedial education from many four-year colleges has had little change. From 1979 to 2005, the percentage of students reporting that they would need remedial work in math in college rose from 21.5% to 24.1% and in science from 9.7% to 10.9%.

With greater racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses, attitudes concerning diversity have caused some concern by researchers, since only slightly more than one-third (34%) of respondents rated the objective of helping to promote racial understanding as important, which is a decline from 46.4% in 1992. In the area of values, the report found that 75.5% of entering college students believe that raising a family is important, followed closely by “being well-off financially” at 73.4% and helping others at 66.7% (the highest rating in 20 years). Students asserted that learning about things of interest and getting a better job were the two most important reasons for going to college in 1976 and again in 2006. In 2006, 66.5% of students indicated that the chief benefit of a college education is that it increases one’s earning power.

According to the report, entering freshmen came from households with a parental median income of $74,000 in 2005, which is 60% higher than the national average of $46,326. This is 14% higher than 1971, when students’ median family income was $13,200, 46% higher than the national average of $9,028.

“As colleges and universities continue their financial policies of increasing tuition and fees, we are seeing direct effects on students that come from poorer families. Poorer students alter their choices of whether or not to go to college at all, or choose a college based on financial costs and packages. Students from wealthier families can endure greater fluctuations in ‘sticker price’ than poorer students, and as a result, more students entering college come from homes that are increasingly wealthier than the national median income,” said Jose Luis Santos, UCLA assistant professor of education and an author of the report.

The report also says that fees play a major role in the economic make up of the new freshmen entering college today. This change will begin to have an impact on college access. What it comes down to is that parental income for entering freshmen is “outpacing” the national income by two to one. What this means is that those students entering institutions are coming from a more economically advantaged background, but the gap continues to widen. “Increasing tuition and fees to offset state appropriation shortfalls or any other expenditure shortfall only favors families in the top fifth of the national income distribution, as they have the greatest ability to pay such rapid increases. For families whose income is below that, as their real wages continue to lose ground, they will face tougher choices regarding the attendance of college and what college to attend,” said Santos.

To receive a copy of the report visit: www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/40yrtrends.php.

—Jamillah Moore, Ed.D.