A study on how students' politics change over the course of their time in college has raised discussion at AU about what and who are the most significant influences on a person's political beliefs.
College students are decidedly more liberal by the time they reach junior year than they were as freshmen, according to a recent study done by the University of California, Los Angeles' Higher Education Research Institute.
UCLA's study is based on a poll of 15,000 students from 136 colleges who entered college in 2004. UCLA posed the same questions to the same students when they were freshman and when they were juniors.
The UCLA study results indicated the shift towards left-leaning beliefs is most noticeably seen in students' opinions on a number of social issues. When the students contacted for the UCLA study were surveyed in freshman year, 54 percent of them supported legal marital status for gay couples. This number rose to 66 percent by the time the students were juniors. The percentage of students who supported legal abortion rose by 14 percentage points between the freshman and junior years. However, the number of students supporting increased military spending declined from 34 percent in freshman year to 25 percent in junior year, according to the study.
The study has found that while college faculty members tend to lean left politically, students are more likely to be influenced in their political beliefs by their peer groups than by their professors.
AU College Republicans President Luke Kraus said university professors have not affected his political views.
"AU professors don't have any major influences on my political beliefs because I came to school well-grounded in my beliefs," he said. "Professors might add nuances to my beliefs, but fundamentally I don't think they have changed any of them."
AU College Democrats President Luke Falcon Sapp said the environment he grew up in and the dynamics within his family influenced his political views.
"Reasons for being a liberal or conservative generally start at home and I am no exception," he said. "I grew up in a mixed household where I had to determine my own political views through political arguments between my parents."
Howard McCurdy, chair of the School of Public Affairs' Department of Public Administration and Policy, said AU's location in D.C. has influenced AU students to become more politically stable in their beliefs than students in other universities.
"I have always thought that the magnetic attraction of events in the city tends to make our juniors more pragmatic," he said. "Undergraduate social science majors at more isolated schools may become more liberal as they move through their college years, but I think our location tends to mitigate against that."
No matter what people's political leanings are, they are most likely to keep the political views they grew up with throughout college, said Jen Fantasia, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.
"A person's political beliefs are mostly based on what kind of environment they grow up in," she said. "When you go to college, you are exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Though a few of your beliefs might change, your beliefs usually stay the same."
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