During college, students attend religious services less often, but they become more spiritual—and that growth is linked to a number of positive academic and personal outcomes. That's one of the key findings of Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students' Inner Lives, a new book based on a longitudinal study of students.
The basis of the book is surveys given to students as entering freshmen and as juniors. The freshman survey was included in a special expanded version of the annual Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshman Survey, conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles's Higher Education Research Institute, which more than 112,000 students took in 2004. A subsample of about 15,000 juniors completed a follow-up survey in the spring of 2007.
The study was designed to measure, separately, students' religious and spiritual qualities. Students' responses from freshman and junior years were compared to show change over the course of college. Researchers released some results from the study in 2007, showing that students became more interested in spirituality and more caring over time.
For the book, however, they mined the data more deeply—examining the relationship between spiritual and religious qualities and other outcomes, such as academic performance and leadership ability. Some of the qualities they looked at were charitable involvement, spiritual quest, and religious engagement.
The authors use the term spirituality broadly, to mean people's inner, subjective lives. They found that students' level of spiritual quest, or seeking meaning and purpose in life, rose during college. By the second survey, eight in 10 students were at least "moderately" engaged in a spiritual quest. Students were more likely as juniors than as freshmen to say they wanted to develop a meaningful philosophy of life, seek beauty, become a more loving person, and attain inner harmony.
Students were also more likely to exhibit equanimity, the authors' term for having a sense of peace and being able to find meaning in hardship, as upperclassmen.
The researchers found that when students grew significantly in equanimity, their grades improved. None of the other spirituality or religion measures had an effect on GPA. Growth in equanimity also raised students' intellectual self-esteem, but the authors were not able to tell if the boost to self-esteem raised students' grades, or if the higher grades led to higher self-esteem.
Students who saw a big growth in equanimity also displayed a greater sense of well-being, larger than average growth in leadership abilities, and a higher level of satisfaction with their college experience. Spiritual quest, on the other hand, had a negative effect on well-being and satisfaction.
And the authors found that students' level of religious struggle, or questioning their beliefs, increased in college. However, their level of religious skepticism or religious commitment stayed about the same, even though their engagement in religion declined. Students also became less religiously conservative, measured by their responses to questions on issues like abortion and casual sex.
One measure of students' spirituality also saw a decline during the college years: charitable involvement. This drop was primarily caused by a dip in students' level of community service, a development the authors suggest might be driven by the greater demands of college-level academic work. They do note that some measures of charitable involvement, donating money and helping friends with their problems, rose during college.
Some activities that occur in college seem to strengthen students' spiritual growth, the authors found. Interdisciplinary studies, service learning, and study abroad were all found to enhance spiritual development, as was a "student-centered" teaching approach.
But there are other things colleges could do to foster students' spiritual growth.
"Some of the most powerful experiences in promoting spiritual development are used very little in higher education now," said Alexander W. Astin, a professor emeritus of higher education at UCLA and one of the authors.
Those experiences include self-reflection, meditation, and contemplation. The authors suggest that colleges should encourage these behaviors. "We can be doing a lot more of that inside and outside of the classes," Mr. Astin said.
Professors may be uncomfortable talking about "spirituality," the authors said. But when faculty were surveyed as part of the project, they said they were interested in activities like helping students develop personal values and enhancing students' self-understanding, efforts that fit the authors' concept of spirituality.
Comments
1. scubagrrl88 - November 17, 2010 at 09:48 am
I enjoyed reading this article and found it encouraging that an academic study has been done to measure college students' change in perceptions of and attitudes toward spirituality and how spirituality is influencing their college experience. As a faculty member at a large regional comprehensive university in northern CA, and in a criminal justice division, until recently, I have left notions of metaphysics and spirituality. However, in the last year and a half, since joining a local religious science spiritual center near my residence, I have brought more of those concepts into the classroom, primarily when discussing alternative sentencing options like restorative justice, victim-offender mediation (VOM), peace-keeping criminology, and so on. The students, this semester, anyway seemed intrigued and asked insightful questions about the process of VOM, for example.
I have also shared with them my own personal journey and small awakenings I have had over the years, beginning with my sobriety 6 yrs ago. In my experience, I have found that as I openly reflect on my own "bumps in the road" in my life and how they have transformed me (where appropriate, of course), students have also been more open and reflective. I do tend to notice this openness more in an online environment (I do teach some online courses, esp. in the summer and through our online degree program). Online vs. in-class sharing is another topic for another day, but the point is, students will become reflective and openly share their views, growth, etc. Our program also offersinternships and a service learning mentoring course, so the students do have opportunities to reflect seriously on their learning, their impact on others' lives, and so on.
Criminal justice is an interesting program on many levels and often attracts students with socially conservative views, esp. those concerning punishment of offenders and the like. These views change over the years due to what has been called a "liberalizing effect" where their views become less punitive. I am not sure exactly why this happens (there are theories and research on this, though), but my thought is that through different courses, process of maturity, critical thinking writing assignments and so on, their views change. I noticed some parallels with the 'liberalizing effect' and some of the findings of this study.
All in all, I think it would be wonderful to integrate more spirituality into college courses. I do share my own views on it and share my own personal path to becoming a licensed spiritual counselor. I am very interested in prison ministry and would like to someday serve in that capacity, but for now, I do my best each day to serve my students and let them know that they are valued members of our global community. I also bring to them the idea of Oneness, that we are all connected through our similarity of humanness; the same yet unique expressions of life on this planet. My hope would be that they would grasp some of these ideas as they venture out into the world as correctional officers, probation officers, parole officers, police officers and so on.
I read an interesting article in Shambala Sun magazine recently about Charles Darwin and compassion and altruism and his views on those ideas. These ideas from Darwin are not usually the ones talked about when Darwin is discussed in an academic setting. The statement "survival of the fittest" is often attributed to him but in reality, it was Herbert Spencer who said it. Darwin believed that all sentient beings should be treated with compassion and that compassion was critical to our survival as a species. It is wonderful that our young folks, college students, are getting that and practicing 'random acts of kindness' in our communities today.
Thank you, Chronicle, for publishing this article. It was very uplifting :)
Namaste,
Sue Escobar
Professor of Criminal Justice
Sacramento State University
2. greeneyeshade - November 18, 2010 at 05:53 pm
Separating religion from spirituality draws a false dichotomy.
Certainly to the great mystics, spirituality was not a subjective excercise. To an empiricist, yes, of course spirituality will be seen as an internal process--what else can the empiricist observe or measure? But the mystics hold that their experience begins outside of themselves. Empirical science cannot measure or test such a claim.
Science must ultimately remain neutral on such a topic--it can neither prove nor disprove its existence, Mr. Hawking et al notwithstanding.
3. shadow8pro - November 23, 2010 at 11:19 am
Basically this indicates that students become less interested in the formal strictures of religion and become more empathetic. Interesting.
4. 11274135 - November 23, 2010 at 05:27 pm
Right. The use of "spirituality" in this context is an unnecessary sop to religion. This research seems to indicate that there is some positive interplay between learning and such characteristics as mindfulness, thoughtfulness, empathy, patience, and kindness. And educated people do seem to become more nuanced in their interaction with other people and the world outside of themselves. This is, perhaps, one of the strongest arguments for comprehensive educational programs rather than occupational training. Indeed, one major problem with folks who are not educated much beyond their personal experience is their inability respond proportionally to adversity and success.