<p>Now this counts as valid information.</p>
<p>The university is doing everything it can to bring students’ various experiences to one baseline. They are not there yet.</p>
<p>[Study:</a> Background impacts experience - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/12/13/29650/]Study:”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/12/13/29650/)</p>
<p>Whether this is only Princeton, or is common to all highly academic universities I do not know.</p>
<p>Hmmm . . . . So straight white male jocks with secular outlooks from urban and suburban backgrounds find it easiest to adjust to life at Princeton? Why does this not surprise me?</p>
<p>I’ll bet if they threw in “attended elite private prep school in the Northeast,” that would register as a positive, too.</p>
<p>I doubt it’s only Princeton. But I’m not sure it’s “all highly academic universities,” either. These sound like mainly social and cultural issues, not academic issues.</p>
<p>Alumother, I know you were on the other forum about the “censored” article from the girl in Vegas. Did you notice that two of the student reader comments on this background study article insulted the author from Vegas?</p>
<p>Re study - Wow, what a revelation!!!</p>
<p>It’s certainly not only Princeton.</p>
<p>I thought this was interesting: </p>
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<p>Why would that be?</p>
<p>^I caught that, too, Bay, and I was a bit surprised by it. My only thought would be that some students with strongly held religious views might feel uncomfortable with the essentially “secular humanist” atmosphere that pervades many elite colleges and universities (or at least, that they perceive to pervade their own college), and avoid certain kinds of interactions in which they may be perceived as out of step, or in which their religious views may be challenged. Easier, then, to attend your classes, take your notes, do your homework, write your papers, do your problem sets, take your exams, without a lot of face-to-face interactions with people whose views may differ from your own. You might find a few friends and/or co-religionists in whom you might confide. It’s a shame, though, because it sounds like these students are depriving themselves of a lot of the resources that a place like Princeton has to offer.</p>
<p>Of course, that’s just speculation on my part. Then again, I came from a pretty conservative religious upbringing, and when I got to college I didn’t avoid those kinds of interactions, and . . . well, let’s just say my religious views evolved pretty far, pretty fast. So maybe they’re onto something.</p>
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Maybe the athletes NEEDED to use the writing center more often. ;)</p>
<p>The study sounds like a big …DUH… They should have just asked people in the parents forum on CC who probably could have predicted what they found.</p>
<p>Bclintonk, my immediate gut feeling, which may be as hit or miss as yours, is that the “religious” just might feel more of the responsibility on themselves and tough out their problems (with God’s help and prayer?) I don’t think secular humanist viewpoints would pervade the writing center or office hours, while it might the lectures, and definitely would the health center - I remember decades back going into the health center at an ivy for a tetanus shot and being offerred birth control, which was aggressively pushed at me. Of course, all these categories have overlaps - is it the rural women religious who don’t go to office hours or the prep school male religious?</p>
<p>Are the actual survey results somewhere online?</p>
<p>If the coaches talk up the tutoring centers, which I am certain they do, and incoming athletes enter a culture where they see upperclass teammates use the academic support services, then that would explain why more athletes use the writing center. Coaches are going to do everything possible to ensure their athletes’ academic success, because that keeps them playing and NCAA eligible.</p>
<p>“Easier, then, to attend your classes, take your notes, do your homework, write your papers, do your problem sets, take your exams, without a lot of face-to-face interactions with people whose views may differ from your own.”</p>
<p>This makes sense to me. I think it is less a fear that the views will be challenged and more that you just feel like you’re a freak and a weirdo in the community.</p>
<p>There’s also a stereotype threat problem here. That is, white middle-class males can use the writing center without any concern about whether their seeking help casts doubt on the abilities of white middle-class males. Rural or URM students don’t have that luxury – they DO worry about whether they are validating bad stereotypes about their group if they seek help. As adults at a remove from the situation, we can see that this is self-defeating behavior, and they’d do better for themselves and their group by asking for help. But in practice, it is a big problem. This is what they mean by a “barrier” to using resources. It’s a level of discomfort only some students have to contend with.</p>
<p>We see this all the time in the law school context. Some law schools, frustrated that minorities and women get lower grades, instituted pre-orientation academic prep programs or other supports intended to help these populations. Who shows up to get the extra help? Largely white males, which worsens the achievement gap instead of improving it.</p>
<p>^^^parentoftwo (post #9),</p>
<p>Well, it may be some of each. “Religious” students come in many different flavors, and the reasons that a Muslim student might have for not engaging in certain kinds of social/academic interactions might differ greatly from those of an observant Jew or an evangelical Christian or a Roman Catholic or a Buddhist or a Hindu. And we don’t know from the limited data reported in the Daily Princetonian whether this is something that cuts across all religious affiliations, or is confined to some or even just one of them.</p>
<p>Your story about health services is interesting, though I didn’t take the Princetonian article to make any reference to willingness to use health services. It was all various kinds of academic interactions the “religious” students were avoiding—or not seizing, to put it less pejoratively…</p>
<p>I bring up the “secular humanism” thing because that’s become a common theme in many conservative Christian criticisms of our institutions of higher education. And because my daughters have a friend who comes out of that kind of background who was just appalled by what she encountered at our public flagship–sex, drugs, alcohol, open homosexuality and advocacy of gay rights, free university-sponsored distribution of condoms. And people, professors and students alike, routinely expressing views that she found shockingly atheistic or profoundly heretical in one way or another. Her response was to pull back, hunker down, do her work, choose classes that would not challenge her religious views, and limit her out-of-classroom interactions with faculty and other students, except those few she trusted, including some who shared her religious views and a few others like my daughters (who were taking some classes our public flagship while still in HS) who didn’t necessarily share her religious views but were already friends from other contexts. </p>
<p>I don’t know that this girl is typical of “religious” students, much less religious students at Princeton. I do know for a fact, however, that most of this girl’s religious friends from HS opted to attend one of the many private religious colleges you can find scattered about, where their views would not be so challenged; and she eventually transferred to one. The kinds of things that this particular girl found so jarring and upsetting happen on college campuses all the time, private as well as public. I think a certain slice of “religious” students find it difficult to engage what becomes the dominant campus culture. I should think it would be in some ways similar for a devoutly religious Muslim student. But whether this is what’s driving the results reported in the Daily Princetonian, I can’t say, and I guess we’ll never know until we see more data.</p>
<p>Maybe there’s an overlap? Could it be that religious students are more likely to come from rural high schools, more likely to be female, more likely to be African-American?</p>
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<p>That is interesting, because Princeton is the #1 school at [CollegeGuide.org</a> - Rating America’s Colleges](<a href=“http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=3]CollegeGuide.org”>http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=3) , which is of conservative political alignment, and likes Christian religious schools (see #3, #5, #6, #7, #9, #10). Apparently, they don’t find Princeton to be too unfriendly to their political and religious viewpoint.</p>
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<p>Interesting, indeed. Could it be that Princeton attracts more Christian conservative applicants than its peers because of ratings like these, and then the enrolled freshmen discover the place is neither as conservative, nor as Christian, as they had been led to expect? I haven’t been back to Princeton in years, but my sense of the place is that the dominant culture there is as thoroughly secular as H, Y, or S, and at least as given over to what the conservative Christian would regard as debauchery (and what most students would regard as “a social life”) as any of them.</p>
<p>To my mind, F. Scott Fitzgerald represents the soul of Princeton: talented, flashy, stylish, “fast”, shallow, self-absorbed, a bit cynical, and (in the eyes of the conservative Christian) debauched. But most of all, immensely talented. I say that as a fan of Fitzgerald’s writing, though not so much as a fan of Princeton which is always eager to claim him. But that all seems pretty far removed from the worldview of a conservative Christian.</p>
<p>This is a shock! They need to repeat the study to confirm their findings before I will believe it.</p>
<p>I’m wondering if it is more perceptions of Princeton undergrads being publicly politically/socially conservative because they were not too long in the past judging from dozens of accounts I’ve heard from 80’s and early '90’s alums and historical accounts of some alums like Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court. </p>
<p>There’s also the factor that in the antebellum period…Princeton was the most popular Ivy among scions of southern plantation owners and maintained its popularity among unreconstructed southerners after the war…as students and faculty as illustrated by Woodrow Wilson.*</p>
<ul>
<li>He segregated the Federal Civil Service in 1913 and screened the pro-Klan D.W. Griffiths’ “Birth of a Nation” movie in the White House during his Presidency.</li>
</ul>
<p>They probably don’t need to repeat the study as much as they need to analyze the results appropriately. Jonri’s comment is spot on.
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<p>Another variable I would have like to have seen mentioned is age –
It might be that the urban students are actually older than the rural students. 7 year old kindergarteners were the norm when we lived in Northern Virginia, but were much less likely in rural areas where people couldn’t afford an extra two years of preschool. Between “gap years” and a two year delay in starting school, it could be that the wealthy urban kids are as much as three years older than poor, rural kids. That would certainly affect your undergrad experience in many ways.</p>