Collegiate influences on the civic values of undergraduate students in the US revisited

Abstract

Even though colleges have long attempted to promote civic-mindedness among students, recently there have been strong calls for a return and rededication to this mission. Given the many social and political changes that have occurred since Pascarella et al. (J High Educ 59(4):412–437, 1988) in Higher education: Handbook of theory and research, study, the purpose of the present investigation was to extend their established line of inquiry by examining college’s influence on the civic values held by a more recent cohort of students. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we analyzed a sample obtained from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, a nationally representative panel study of college students administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, which sample includes 12,738 undergraduate students from 106 four-year universities. Our findings mostly confirmed our theoretic conceptualization of collegiate influences on the civic values of students. As expected, those values were positively associated with students’ involvement in diverse activities. Institutional impacts, however, disappeared, except for structural diversity. University administrators and educators might find these results informative when developing institutional policies and practices to prepare students for good citizenship in the global society.