The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is conducting a major new research program supported by the Foundation to track the spiritual growth of students during their college years. The study builds on an abundance of anecdotal evidence that suggests growing interest on college campuses to acknowledge religion and spirituality as core components of a liberal arts education. The project employs a multi-institutional and longitudinal design to identify trends, patterns, and principles of spirituality and religiousness among college students.
Spirituality points to our interiors, our subjective life. . . . The spiritual domain thus has to do with human consciousness—what we experience privately in our subjective awareness. . . . [It is concerned] with the values that we hold most dear, our sense of who we are and where we come from, our beliefs about why we are here—the meaning and purpose that we see in our work and our life—and our sense of connectedness to each other and to the world around us.” This is part of the HERI project’s working definition of spirituality. College students who are beginning to wrestle with spiritual questions in new ways—or perhaps for the first time—are a fitting population for such survey research, yet very little previous developmental research has focused on students’ spirituality. That which exists has been conducted at single institutions or usually at religious-affiliated colleges.
When broadly conceived, “spirituality also connects us to those aspects of our experience that are not easy to define or talk about, such things as intuition, inspiration, creativity, the mysterious, the sacred and the mystical.” As the authors of the HERI study observe, “When viewed within this very broad umbrella, spirituality is, we believe, a universal impulse and reality.” Their project—“Spirituality in Higher Education:
A National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose” – will track trends, patterns, and principles of spiritual growth during the college years. The data and insights may prove useful to colleges and universities interested in enhancing opportunities for college students to grow spiritually and religiously.
College is a critical time for students. They enter as fledgling adults still growing in skills and maturity. Their worldviews are largely inherited from their parents; often their values are vague or as yet untested. Yet it is precisely at this point in their history when life-changing decisions come one after another—the choice of a college, a major, a career, and even a spouse. The bewildering array of important decisions causes many students to reflect on what they want out of life and what kind of contribution they will make to the world. This research is the first in a series of reports on a national study of college students’ spiritual development.
The first stage—a pilot survey—was completed in the spring of 2003 by approximately 3,700 juniors at a representative sample of colleges and universities participating in the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) annual survey of entering freshmen. The 2003 study discovered a high level of spiritual engagement and commitment among college students: more than half placed a high value on “integrating spirituality” in their lives—“77% saying we are all spiritual beings” and 71% saying they “gain strength by trusting in a higher power.” However, at this critical juncture in their lives, college students find themselves largely on their own. More than half report that their professors never provide opportunities to discuss the meaning and purpose of life, and nearly two-thirds say their professors never encourage discussions of spiritual or religious matters. “The survey shows that students have deeply felt values and interests in spirituality and religion, but their academic work
and campus programs seem to be divorced from it,” says Alexander W. Astin, the coprincipal investi-gator of HERI’s Spirituality in Higher Education research project, director of HERI and the Allan M. Carter Professor of Higher Education at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Higher education needs to explore how well it's meeting the great traditions at the core of a liberal arts education, grounded in the maxim, ‘know thyself,’” says Astin, who is also the founding director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, an ongoing national study of some ten million students, 250,000 faculty and staff and 1,500 higher education institutions.
Colleges and universities have historically addressed education holistically, integrating the academic, spiritual, and even physical education of their students. Most of America’s great universities, including Harvard and Yale, have religious charters and were launched with strong spiritual emphases. But these ideals have been set aside. “If we just teach students how to make money or become rich and famous we are not fulfilling our responsibility as educational institutions,” says Astin. It’s completely understandable…to keep religion and academic study separate.” Astin says. “But spirituality is a much more generic concept that for many students doesn’t necessarily mean religion, and all students are on some kind of a spiritual development path. We can do a lot more to assist them.”
“One of the most important things about spirituality is that it touches directly on our sense of community,” says the HERI project report. “Giving spirituality a more central place in our institutions will thus serve to strengthen students’ sense of connectedness with each other, their faculty and their institutions.”
The report and Astin’s comments have found strong support in the preliminary study.
 “Most college students are pondering spirituality. . . there’s a gap between the degree of interest in these issues that young people display and the extent to which colleges inspire students to explore them.”
— Alexander Astin |
