Life Goals of First-Year College Students in the United States Percentage who identify goal as very important or essential Develop a meaningful philosophy of life Be very well-off financially Help promote racial understanding 100 80 60 40 20 0 1995 2010 2013 2000 1966 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 2005 82.0 44.8 35.7 Sources: Eagan et al. 2013; Pryor et al. 2007. Photo: © Design Pics/Carson Ganci RF © Ballyscanion/PhotoDisc/Getty RF In Arab cultures, men sometimes hold hands as a sign of affection and friendship. Photo: © dbimages/Alamy. 54 • SOC 2016 a list serves as a starting point in defining America’s national character. Each year more than 200,000 first-year college students at approximately 270 of the nation’s four-year colleges fill out a questionnaire asking them which values are most important to them. Because of its coverage, content, and scope, this survey provides a kind of barometer of the nation’s values. The top value of the first-year class of 1966, the year the survey was first conducted, was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” with 80 percent of the new students identifying it as either essential or very important. By contrast, only 44 percent chose “being very well-off financially.” Since that time, the relative position of these two values has flipped (see graph). Among the first-year class represents a collective value. As American essayist Richard Rodriguez points out, “American individualism is a communally derived value, not truly an expression of individuality. The teenager persists in rebelling against her parents, against tradition or custom, because she is shielded . . . by American culture from the knowledge that she inherited her rebellion from dead ancestors and living parents” (2002:130). Of course, all members of a society do not uniformly agree on its values. Angry political debates and billboards promoting conflicting causes tell us that much. The values of a culture may change, but most remain relatively stable during any one person’s lifetime. Socially shared, intensely felt values are a fundamental part of our lives in the United States. Sociologist Robin Williams (1970) has offered a list of U.S. basic values. These include freedom, equality, democracy, morality, conformity, progress, humanitarianism, and material comfort. Obviously, not all 320 million people in the United States agree on all these values, but such SOCTHINK Consider Williams’s list of basic values. Do you think most people value these things? How might some values, such as freedom and conformity, conflict? How do we resolve such conflicts?
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