Making good friends on campus is a key factor in college retention and academic success. This report tells its readers how many and which college students consider themselves successful on campus at making friends, how successful they feel that they have been, and how successful they feel that their peers are in making friends on campus. The report also gives highly detailed data on how students feel about the efforts of college administration to foster amicable social relations on campus and exactly how the pandemic has impacted student’s social lives.
Just a few of the findings in this 107-page report are that:
-
Students who grew up in rural areas were less successful than others in making friendly connections on campus.
-
Students in private colleges fare considerably better than those in public ones in making friends on campus.
-
Hispanic students were significantly likelier than others to report that their peers were lonely.
-
The social lives of student of Islamic or Hindu religious backgrounds were more likely than others to have been disrupted by the pandemic.
-
More than half of those at BA level colleges were successful or very successful in making friends at college versus less than 30% of those at masters level colleges.
Data in the report is broken out by more than 20 personal and institutional variables, so, for example, readers can get specific data on success in friendship formation for first year students vs. sophomores, juniors or seniors, or for students in level 1 research universities vs. doctoral institutions, or for male vs. female or vs. transgender students, or for business/economics majors vs fine arts majors, etc., etc.
Breakouts include age, year of school standing, major or intended major, religion, gender, sexual orientation, income level, SAT/ACT scores, college grades, regional origins, race/ethnicity, level of school tuition, size of school of institution attended and many other variables. This is a critical resource for policy makers in retention, assessment and student services as well as a unique data source for social scientists and other studying higher education.