The First Questions in College

In 1972 American Department of Education published forty pages of facts about college freshmen in the United States. The facts had been obtained from thousands of students in their first year of university study by asking such questions as these:

How old will you be on December 31st of this year?

How many miles is this college from your parents' home?

Where did you live while you' re growing up? Are your parents still living, and are they still married to each other?

The answers to these questions showed that seventy-eight percent of the freshmen were eighteen years old, and fourteen percent were nineteen. It is quite unusual for a freshman to be younger than eighteen or older than nineteen.

More than half of the freshmen were studying in colleges far from their parents' homes; only forty percent were within a distance of fifty miles from home. The report showed that most college students had grown up in or near cities. About one-fifth of the freshmen reported that they had been brought up in small towns; only seven percent came from country families.

Rather surprisingly, the report showed that comparatively few of the freshmen (8%) had parents who were still alive and still married to each other.

When asked how they were paying for their education, almost a third of freshmen said they had part-time jobs or were working during summer vacations. For a few, scholarships were sources of support. However, fifty-six percent of the students depended upon their parents to pay their college bills.

For many of these families a college education was something new. Less than half of the freshmen's fathers had never attended college themselves.