Tweet
An astonishing 71.3% of college freshmen support marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples, according to UCLA’s Freshman Survey, an annual national survey of first-year students entering four-year colleges and universities. Alana Klein Prisco of UCLA describes the results (emphasis added):
An unprecedented 71.3 percent of incoming college students indicated that same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status, compared with 64.9 percent in 2009, a remarkable 6.4 percentage-point increase over a two-year period. While support for same-sex marriage is highest among female students and those who identify as liberal, a significant amount of conservative students (42.8 percent) and an increasing number of male students (64.1 percent in 2011 vs. 56.7 percent in 2009) expressed support for this issue.
It is worth repeating the finding that party lines are crashing precipitously as a barrier to support for marriage equality among college students. The same trend is starting to be seen among legislative leaders.
“Among students entering college, we’re seeing a more unified support for same-sex marriage that reaches across political party lines,” said John H. Pryor, lead author of the report and director of CIRP. “Given the influence of young voters in the last presidential election, candidates may want to pay careful attention to the student perspective on these and other civil rights issues.”
The survey also found that incoming freshmen are more supportive than their predecessors of a woman’s right to choose abortion and of allowing undocumented students access to public education. At the same time, alcohol consumption by this cohort is at an all time low and time spent studying is on the increase.
The survey collected responses from 203,697 full-time freshmen students at 270 colleges and universities across the country.
Addendum
In the comments below, Zimbel raised the very reasonable question as to whether the numbers reported above are a blip. Far from being a blip, they are part of a long trend towards increasing support for marriage equality by college students. I’ve adapted the chart below from UCLA’s report. The left-most red arrow points to the same-sex marriage trend line, which charts data collected through 2009. The right-most red arrow points to the students’ 2011 response to the same-sex marriage question.
7 Comments
At first, I assumed that this was a statistical blip. But with over 200,000 respondents, that’s very unlikely.
I hope it continues.
Other things that stick out to me from this survey, largely because they’re so different from when I went to college… around 2 decades ago:
Your Current Religious Preference: None 24.5%
Smoked Cigarettes (Frequently or Occasionally in the past year: 2.8%
It’s really heartening to see this. I’m not that surprised by it, either.
That said, it’s kind of like a prior post about how the vast majority of CA voters support marijuana legalization. The PTB say: SO????
Look: gay marriage, like abortion, is, cough cough, the dawg’s *gift* to the PTB/1% who run so-called “politics” in our once-great nation. And they are NOT going to bust up that cash cow until they absolutely have to.
The 1% will continue to push the rightwing propoganda about gay marriage through the media wurlitzer and the so-called “churches,” and they get as much mileage out of it as they can.
Eventually, however, this will change, but it’ll take far too long. JMHO, of course, and would love to be proven wrong.
Interestingly, at most 40% could be described as supporting anything resembling equality of opportunity, according to that last chart.
So while there’s certainly good news for LGB people here, we’re at under two-thirds support for women’s basic bodily self-determination and maybe a third who think that inherited socioeconomic caste is a bad idea.
Did anyone email Mr Referendum on Same Sex Marriage, also known as Governor Crispy Cream of New Jersey? Maybe he should’n be so confident that the people of Jersey will vote against. There are a log Catholics in Jersey but I will bet there are a whole, excuse the expression, flock of college people.
And don’t make negative assumptions about Catholics. 63 to 71% of American Catholics support marriage equality and know how to vote their consciences. It’s the Roman Catholic hierarchy that it pro-discrimination, not the rank and file.
Which is why the Koch-suckers in the state legislatures are making it harder and harder for college students to vote!
Two years ago, if it weren’t for the efforts of the students, Bowling Green wouldn’t have passed two non-discrimination ordinances.
College students spend nearly nine months in the city where they attend college, unless they’re commuter students. This means what happens there effects them more than back home. Which is why ALEC has declared war on a college student’s ability to vote.
The dip from 2004-06 must coincide with the elections in which “marriage” was a wedge issue in the national election cycle? I guess the kids got back on track after they found how they had been used?
This is good info. Thanks for the data.