On several recent occasions I have heard it said that about 25% of our students aren’t involved in anything on campus. I am always intrigued by the way that some assertions or beliefs evolve into facts on a college campus, and this number seemed ripe for investigating. Researchers into human behavior have found this phenomenon repeatedly and suggest that, because we want to believe our own intuition to be true, we tend to perk up at data points or anecdotes that support our beliefs. We’ve all fallen prey to this temptation at least once – at least I have. So I thought it might be worth testing this claim just to see if it holds up under the glare of our actual survey data.
First – to be fair, this claim isn’t totally crazy. I can think of a particular data point that clearly nods in the direction of the 25% uninvolved claim. For a few years, we’ve tracked the proportion of seniors who don’t use their Augie Choice money, and – although the number is steadily declining – over the last few years an average of about 25% have foregone those funds. Others have suggested that every year we have a group of somewhere between 600 and 800 students (henceforth called “the muddlers”) who aren’t involved in anything co-curricular; athletics, music groups, or student clubs and organizations. More ominously, some have suggested that there is a sub-population of students who are only involved in Greek organizations and that these students help to create an environment that isn’t conducive with our efforts to make Augustana a rigorous learning experience. (All of that is a wordy euphemism for “these lazy bums party too much.”).
Although the question of what should count as true involvement is a legitimate one, the question of simple participation is an empirical question that we can test. So we looked at two sets of data – our 2013 senior survey data and our 2013 freshmen survey data – to see what proportion of students report not being involved in anything co-curricular. No athletics, no music, and no student clubs or organizations. Then we added the question of Greek membership just to see if the aforementioned contingent of deadbeats really does exist in numbers large enough to foment demonstrable mayhem. (another wordy euphemism for “be loud and break stuff.”).
Well, I’ve got bad news for the muddlers. Your numbers aren’t looking so hot. From the students who graduated last spring, only 17 out of 495 said that they didn’t participate in anything (athletics, music, student groups, or Greeks). When we took the Greek question out of the equation we only gained 5 students, ultimately finding that only about 5% (23/495) of our graduating seniors said that they didn’t participate in athletics, music, or some student group.
But what about the freshmen? After all, the seniors are the ones who have stayed for four years. If involvement is the magic ingredient for retention that some think it is, then we should expect this proportion to be quite a bit bigger in the freshman class.
Alas, though our muddler group appears a little bigger in the first year, it sure doesn’t approach the 25% narrative. After eliminating freshmen who participated in athletics, music, a student group, and a Greek organization, we were left with only 15 out of 263 first year students who responded to our survey. When we left out Greek membership, we only gained 4 students, increasing the number to 19 out of 263 (7%). Now it’s fair to suggest that there is a limitation to this data in that we got responses from only about 45% of the freshman class. However, even after calculating the confidence intervals (the “+/-“) in order to generalize with 95% confidence to the entire freshman class, we still end up with range in proportion of students not involved in anything co-curricular somewhere between 4 and 9 percent.
There are two other possible considerations regarding the muddler mystery. One possibility is that there are indeed more than we know because the non-participant would also be more likely to not fill out the freshman survey. On the other hand – as some of our faculty have observed, it’s possible that our muddlers are also the students who study more seriously; just the kind of students faculty often dream of teaching.
My reason for writing this post is NOT to suggest that we don’t have some students who need to be more involved in something outside of their classes. We certainly have those students, and if it is almost 10% of our freshman class (as the upper bound of the confidence interval suggests), then we clearly have work to do. Rather, it seems to me that this is another reason to think more carefully about the nature of involvement’s impact on students. Because it appears that the students who depart after the first year are not merely uninvolved recluses (again, the limitations of the sample requires that I suggest caution in jumping to too certain a conclusion). It seems to me that this evidence is another reason to think about involvement as a means to other outcomes that are central to our educational mission instead of an end in and of itself.
Make it a good day,
Mark