Educating tomorrow’s reformists: factors affecting the development of undergraduates’ social progressivism

ABSTRACTResearchers have unpacked the ways in which students participate in democracy through voting and other forms of civic engagement. However, very little empirical work has delved into how students develop socially progressive values, despite their unprecedented importance to young people during their years in higher education. Rooted in a rich historical context of campus demonstration spanning the past 75 years and current events in the United States, this inspection of college students’ social progressivism was grounded by Pascarella’s model of students’ learning and cognitive development, and uses OLS (ordinary least squares) regression to investigate the phenomenon. Analyzing data collected by the Cooperative and Institutional Research Program from 159 institutions across the United States, this study explored the predictive capacity of students’ interaction with influential agents of socialization and other variables central to undergraduates’ college experiences. Results indicate that socially...