Undergraduates' Reasons for Attending University
Why do young adults attend university? It's a question with many possible answers.
In our research, we asked 675 students taking an introductory psychology course to tell us why they had come to university. What did they see as the benefits of pursuing a degree? For the majority, career-related reasons were at the forefront of their spontaneously-generated responses. The career-related benefits described by these students included the idea that they would get into an interesting/satisfying career (mentioned by 64% of the sample) and develop career-related knowledge (mentioned by 56% of the sample). Other benefits of a degree - including personal fulfillment and the inherent value of learning - were mentioned far less frequently (typically 10% of the sample or less).
In an interesting twist, we obtained somewhat different results when we posed the question in a slightly different way. In the second part of the study, we provided these same undergraduates with a list of 15 potential benefits and asked them to assign 100 points to indicate the relative importance of these benefits. When presented with this task, the participants endorsed a much wider set of degree-related benefits. In particular, they were far more likely to suggest the inherent value of education for its own sake, and the importance of learning as a means of fostering personal growth. Quite clearly, these benefits are valued by undergraduates but are not necessarily "front and centre" in their minds.
The paper documenting these findings (Norton & Martini, 2016) is currently under review.
In our research, we asked 675 students taking an introductory psychology course to tell us why they had come to university. What did they see as the benefits of pursuing a degree? For the majority, career-related reasons were at the forefront of their spontaneously-generated responses. The career-related benefits described by these students included the idea that they would get into an interesting/satisfying career (mentioned by 64% of the sample) and develop career-related knowledge (mentioned by 56% of the sample). Other benefits of a degree - including personal fulfillment and the inherent value of learning - were mentioned far less frequently (typically 10% of the sample or less).
In an interesting twist, we obtained somewhat different results when we posed the question in a slightly different way. In the second part of the study, we provided these same undergraduates with a list of 15 potential benefits and asked them to assign 100 points to indicate the relative importance of these benefits. When presented with this task, the participants endorsed a much wider set of degree-related benefits. In particular, they were far more likely to suggest the inherent value of education for its own sake, and the importance of learning as a means of fostering personal growth. Quite clearly, these benefits are valued by undergraduates but are not necessarily "front and centre" in their minds.
The paper documenting these findings (Norton & Martini, 2016) is currently under review.