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FRESHMAN MORALE c:: AT M.I.T. 19~{ by LEILA SUSSMANN

THE CLASS OF 1961 FRESHMAN MORALE AT M.I.T.

by Leila Suss mann

Published by the

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

111 arch, 1960

f~rchives

M.I.T. L!BHi~r~~~:~::

NOV 2 1 1988 NSCEiVED

Copyright 1960, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

PREFACE

The people who assisted in the execution of this study as coders, interviewers, and typists are too numerous to mention individually, but I should like to thank them collectively for their work. Dr. Gene Levine, co-author of the interim report, was also my collaborator in collecting the materials for Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this report. Mrs. Roberta Simmons helped to ana­lyze the data for Chapter 5, and she is co-author of that chapter. Gilbert Levin and Herman Israel, along with Mrs. Simmons, labored productively through a summer of coding interviews. Miss Peggy Golde gave special assistance with interviewing. David Gleicher, Research Associate of the Center for Interna­tional Studies at M.LT., has offered helpful suggestions and criticisms throughout the project. Professor Daniel Lerner of the M.LT. Department of Economics and Social Science was kind enough to read and criticize the final manuscript.

My greatest appreciation goes to the Class of 1961, who allowed themselves to be observed, and to the members of the M.I.T. administration and Undergraduate Association, who en­couraged me to exercise complete freedom in making the study and writing the report.

Wellesley College September, 1959

iii

LEILA SUSSMANN

Erratum On page 21, the last sentence of the first paragraph should read as follows: nSixty­seven per cent of the students about to enter the Institute claimed that it would be 'some­what difficult' or 'very difficult' to finance their four years at M.I.T.u

CONTENTS

List of Tables vii Introduction IX

PART ONE THE FRESHMAN YEAR

CHAPTER 1 Four Freshmen 3 CHAPTER 2 The Entering Freshman: A Collective

Profile 18 CHAPTER 3 At the End of the Year. 28

PART TWO MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

CHAPTER 4 The Measurement of Morale 55 CHAPTER 5 Academic Performance and Aspirations 63 CHAPTER 6 Personal Relationships and Values 82

Conclusion 93 Appendix. 97

v

TABLE I

TABLE 2

TABLE 3

TABLE 4 TABLE 5

TABLE 6

TABLE 7 TABLE 8 TABLE 9

TABLE 10

TABLE II

TABLE 12 TABLE 13 TABLE 14 TABLE 15

TABLE 16

TABLE 17 TABLE 18 TABLE 19 TABLE 20

LIST OF TABLES

Time Given to Study, Homework, and Extracurricular Activities in the Senior Year at High School 22 Amount of Time Students Planned to Give to Study and Homework at M.I.T. and Amount of Time They Actually Gave . 24 Gratification from Solving Theoretical and Practical Problems 26 Type of Achievement Which Would be Most Gratifying 26 Favorable Comments About M.I.T. in August, 1957, and in May, 1958 30 Unfavorable Comments About M.I.T. in August, 1957, and in May, 1958 30 Freshman Interest in Required Courses 36 Freshman Ratings of the Difficulty of Required Courses 36 Students' Comparisons of M.I.T. with Their Own Pref· erences for Independence and Dependence in the Classroom . 38 Preferences for Independence or Dependence in the Classroom: August, 1957, and May, 1958 . 38 Comparison of August and May Choices of Independ· ent or Dependent Alternative for Individual Freshmen 38 Evaluations of Living Groups 40 Evaluations of Specific Living Groups 41 Satisfaction with Study Conditions by Living Group 44 Sentiments Against "Too Much Studying" by Living Group. 45 Freshmen Responses to Questions on Morale; Com· parison with Freshmen in an Eastern Women's College 59 Personal Esprit and Attitude Toward M.I.T. 60 Academic Performance and Personal Esprit 64 Academic Performance and Attitude Toward M.I.T. 64 Hours of Study in High School and Performance at M.I.T. 66

vii

viii

TABLE 21

TABLE 22 TABLE 23 TABLE 24

TABLE 25

TABLE 26

TABLE 27 TABLE 28 TABLE 29A

TABLE 29B

TABLE 30 TABLE 31 TABLE 32A

TABLE 32B

TABLE 33 TABLE 34 TABLE 35 TABLE 36 TABLE 37 TABLE 38 TABLE 39 TABLE 40

TABLE 41

TABLE 42

TABLE 43 TABLE 44 TABLE 45

TABLE Al

TABLE A2

TABLE A3

TABLE A4 TABLE A5 TABLE A6 TABLE A7

TABLE A8

TABLE A9

LIST OF TABLES

Hours of Study at M.LT. and Performance During Freshman Year Performance and Aspiration Level. Aspiration Pattern and Performance Level Rank Aspirations and Expectations of Freshmen at M.I.T. and at College X Performance Level and Discrepancy Between Expected End-of-Year Cum and Actual Midyear Cum Pre-M.LT. Aspirations and Aspirations after Midyear Grades of Low and Medium-Low Performers Perception of Rank in Class and Performance. Performance and Living Groups Living Groups and Aspiration Patterns of High and Medium-High Performers Living Groups and Aspiration Patterns of Low and Medium-Low Performers Attitude Toward M.LT. and Aspiration Pattern Personal Esprit and Aspiration Patterns Personal Esprit and Aspiration Patterns of High and Medium-High Performers. Personal Esprit and Aspiration Patterns of Low and Medium-Low Performers Aspiration and Achievement Study Conditions and Morale Study Conditions and Performance Living Groups and Personal Esprit. Living Groups and Attitudes Toward M.LT. Academically Oriented Values and Morale Socially Oriented Values and Morale Socially Oriented Values, Hours of Study, and Resent­ment of Workload . Socially Oriented Values, Hours to Dating and Social­izing, and Satisfaction with Amount of Recreation Time to Dating and Socializing in High School and Re­sentment of Workload at M.I.T. Personal Esprit and Resentment of Workload . Personal Esprit and Satisfaction with Recreation . Family Income and Personal Esprit APPENDIX

Occupations of Freshmen's Fathers Compared with the Occupations of White Males in the U. S. Labor Force in 1958 Incomes of Freshmen's Families Compared with Fam­ily Income for the U.S. Population in 1956 Education of Freshmen's Fathers Compared with All U.S. Males Aged 35-55 in 1950 Number of Close Friends and Living Group N umber of Close Friends and Type of Room Time Per Week to Study Time Per Week to Extracurricular Activities and Hobbies Shifts in Amount of Study Time Between Secondary School and M.LT .. Shifts in Number of Extracurricular Activities Between Secondary School and M.LT.

66 68 68

70

71

71 72 73

73

73 74 75

75

75 77 83 83 83 83 85 86

87

87

88 88 89 89

97

97

98 98 98 99

99

99

99

INTRODUCTION

This is the final report of a project commissioned by the Under­graduate Association of M.I.T. to study a class of M.I.T. fresh­men in order to discover what contributes to high or low morale among them.

The study began in July, 1957. Nearly everyone of the 909 members of the Class of '61 filled out a paper-and-pencil ques­tionnaire mailed to him at his home the summer before he entered the Institute. These questionnaires provided some in­formation on the social characteristics of freshmen, on their work habits, and on their hopes and expectations concerning M.I.T. and their later careers.

As the freshman year began for this class, the staff of the study made personal observations of fraternity Rush Week, of Freshman Orientation Week, and of early class sessions. During the first six weeks we conducted lengthy interviews with every member of one freshman section. Four freshmen kept daily journals of their school lives which they submitted to the project, and each of them was interviewed weekly concerning the con­tents of his journal.

In the weeks just preceding final examinations, a few fresh­men whom we knew through earlier contacts were reinterviewed at some length to find out what their feelings and views were at that point and particularly to discover whether there had been any substantial changes since September. These rambling in­terviews, in which students discussed whatever they wished,

ix

x INTRODUCTION

became the basis for a second set of questions which were put to a random sample of the class in one-to-two-hour interviews early in May.

All the materials thus collected form the basis for our report. An interim report on some of the data was submitted in March, 1958.1 It dealt with three selected topics: the occupational plans of the freshmen before they entered the Institute; fraternity rushing and pledging practices; and the factors-other than scholastic aptitude-which influenced academic performance during the first seven weeks of the freshman year.

The present report describes the social characteristics of the freshmen and the expectations concerning college life which they held before coming to M.LT. It reports how they experi­enced the initial period of adjustment to M.LT., and it surveys their attitudes and opinions at the end of the year. Then, turn­ing to the core problem of the study, it reports our findings on the causes and consequences of high and low morale.

The reader need hardly be warned against over generalizing the findings of the study. Strictly speaking, they apply to just one freshman class. However, it is likely that the Class of '61 was not atypical of contemporary freshman classes at M.LT. That many statements made about freshmen do not apply to upperclassmen will be clear to anyone with college experience. Each of the four years has a definite position in the college cycle, and variations from year to year may be quite sharp. Some current studies which follow students through all four years of college are documenting this fact in detai1.2

Another very obvious limitation is that we have described the freshman year using observations made only from the stand­point of the freshman himself. The other major actors on the scene-the faculty-appear in this report only as the freshmen saw them. Limited resources made it impossible for us to attempt any study of the faculty's perspective on the freshman year. But beyond this, as everyone knows, students are the most available of subjects for research, while faculties are another matter.

1 Leila Sussmann and Gene N. Levine, The Entering Freshman at M.I.T.: Class 0/ 1961.

2 David Gleicher of the M.I.T. Center for International Studies has con­ducted a study of an M.I.T. junior class which touches on many of the same areas dealt with here. When his data are analyzed, they will throw some light on the changes which occur as the student progresses through M.I.T.

PART ONE THE FRESHMAN YEAR

CHAPTER 1 FOUR FRESHMEN

In its large design, our study consists of two cross-sectional pictures-one taken before the freshmen entered M.LT. and one taken toward the end of their first year. However, we also made more intensive observations of four students. Between October 1 and November 1 they kept journals of their lives at M.LT. Each day they put down whatever seemed worth recording. Once a week, each was interviewed to explore his experiences further. At the end of April three of them were interviewed again.

These four young men were more given to self-examination than most freshmen, and their records provide much insight into the problems of transition from secondary school to M.LT. They included one fraternity and three dormitory residents and -as chance would have it-two who found the early going easy and two who found it hard.

JOHN SMITH

Let us begin with John Smith, 1 a fraternity man whose first six weeks at M.LT. were atypical. For as long as we followed him, he was having a wonderful time.

1 To avoid any possibility of identification, a number of personal details concerning the diarists have been changed, disguised, or scrambled­without, however, changing the main outlines of their experiences.

3

4 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

In an era of great nervousness concerning admission to first­rate colleges, Smith did not bother to apply to any school other than M.LT. When he came, he came to a place already familiar through family lore and one where he had many personal con­nections. A family tradition of this sort can be a burden, but it wasn't to Smith. He didn't think he cared to become an execu­tive, as his engineer uncles had done, because he was "incapable of delegating responsibility." He doubted that he would make as much money as his father, but he said this didn't matter. He supposed that people were expecting him to be like his older brother, but he wasn't. "Our prejudices are different," was the way he put it.

Smith was quite undecided about his future occupation ex­cept for thinking that it would be related to science and engi­neering. During the first six weeks he expressed interest in physics, electrical engineering, civil engineering, and architec­ture. His indecision was not due to ignorance. Because of his many contacts with scientists and engineers he had a far better idea of the careers open to him than most freshmen possessed. Neither was he insecure; quite the contrary. Our interim report showed that M.LT. freshmen from upper-middle-class homes were less likely to have made definite career choices before com­ing to M.LT. than freshmen from economically poorer back­grounds. We inferred that their greater certainty of high occupational status left these advantaged students free to be flexible about "details" yet a while. Smith is a case in point.1

But Smith's advantages only began with his family back­ground. He had attended an excellent preparatory school where, as he said, "I probably worked harder than I do here." His grounding in calculus, chemistry, and physics was so good that in the first six weeks at the Institute he encountered "no really new material, although they approach things a little differently." In the humanities, too, he was at ease since he had studied Latin, Greek, and ancient history intensively. But most important were the discipline and the learning skills which had become a part of him long before he entered college. He read swiftly. He knew how to organize his work. He was able to concentrate effectively on the tasks he set himself. He took long hours at his desk cheer­fully for granted. The difference between his study habits and those of his fellow freshmen struck Smith himself. In his journal he wrote:

1 SUSlsmann and Levine, op. cit., pp. 35-39.

FOUR FRESHMEN 5

I've noticed there are a lot of people here who just don't know how to study. They never had to work before. They have to find out what the best study methods are for themselves. How long to stick at it at one stretch. They have to learn to take a book out and stick with it until it's finished instead of jumping around from one thing to another. That's wasteful. Even their reading ability may have something to do with it. Some people have trouble getting through the humanities assignments.

Smith escaped the chief bane of M.LT. freshmen: time pres­sure. He was very busy, but his life was not the seemingly end­less routine of all work and no play which so many of his classmates complained about:

I'm pretty busy. Not with work, that's about the same, but with extra­curricular activities. [Here he described three different sports he was actively engaged in.] I'm on the X committee and there's a meeting com­ing up. There's no time for work on the weekend. Weekends are full around here. There are all sorts of social functions. Sunday I sleep until dinner which is 1 :00 p.m .... School work isn't bad ... I do about 25 to .30 hours of study a week ... I only need 7 hours of sleep and I'm about the only one who hasn't had the flu.

Considering this varied, pleasant life, along with the fact that none of his grades had yet fallen below 90, it is not surpris­ing that Smith's journal was filled with a sense of enjoyment. His favorite sport was "becoming a religion with me." His fraternity brothers were "all good guys" whom he was eager to impress favorably. His mathematics professor was both excel­lent and amusing. His elective was "a lot of hard work and fun." Even R.O.T.e. seemed rather a good thing to Smith. He was perhaps an unusual freshman, but he nevertheless demonstrates an important point. For a young man blessed with good physical and mental health, superior ability, good discipline, and good preparation, the first six weeks at M.LT. can be happy indeed.

Unfortunately we were not able to see Smith again at the end of the year so we don't know what happened to him, but it is interesting to note that he had no very ambitious expectations. His older brother's experience led him to anticipate that "Tech will catch up with me just before sophomore year." Then, he thought, his grades might go down at the same time that he would have to work harder. He accepted these probabilities matter-of-factly. Unlike most of his classmates, he was not fac­ing a challenge of unknown dimensions. He knew in a much more intimate way than they how "tough" the work at M.LT. can be. He was quite prepared to find that in the long run he was not a truly brilliant student. Since his hopes were so modest,

6 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

it is unlikely that he suffered any serious disappointment. Prob­ably his morale continued to be high.

BILL GREEN

Our second freshman, Bill Green, came from a middle-sized New England city. His father was a skilled laborer. His mother went to work as a secretary when Green was in high school to help finance her children's higher education. When he was quite young, Green had become impressed with the fact that the "edu­cated" parents of some of his friends had an easier life than his own parents enjoyed. His mother and father reinforced the lesson by telling him often that only through education could he hope to avoid a life of monotonous toil. They then "left it to him" how hard he would work in school. Actually he "took things pretty easy, spent more time on extracurricular things than on school work," and still came out at the top of his high school class.

Green's favorite subject in high school was biology. His first ambition was to be a doctor, but he abandoned it when he real­ized that all of the family's collective effort, even with the scholarship aid he could reasonably hope to receive, would not see him through college and medical school. He then decided on engineering, because he was scientifically inclined and be­cause it promised the greatest potential earning power for the time and money he could invest.

He tried for M.LT. because some very successful engineers in his home town were Institute graduates. Green believed, or wanted to believe, that an M.LT. degree would virtually guar­antee him a high-level administrative position. This, rather than "technical work," was what he hoped eventually to achieve. He returned to this point many times in his journal:

<Perhaps we freshmen expect too much of M.I.T. The freshmen feel, "If I i,get out of here, I've got it made. The world is ours. Everyone will rush to

us. We'll get good jobs and a good chance for getting ahead in the world." This is even the opinion of some of the alumni who have gotten ahead in the world. Of course there are isolated cases who haven't. . . . I don't have ideas of being a technical worker. I don't want to be a scientist. A scientist has to be really in love with his work. He may do 300 or 400 tests of the same kind. An engineer gets out to work with people and applies science in a more practical sense. Engineers from M.LT. get ahead in administrative positions as I would like to do.

Green arrived at the Institute with two scholarships, a job, and a closely figured budget. He came to Rush Week and re-

FOUR FRESHMEN 7

ceived a bid which he would have liked to accept. But he was afraid that the extra demands on his time, combined with his job in the cafeteria, might detract from his studies. He couldn't afford to let his grades suffer for fear he might lose his scholar­ships. Instead, he moved into a single room on East Campus which he and his next-door neighbor shortly turned into "virtu­ally a double." Later in the semester he felt this choice had been the right one. He said that fraternity men sacrificed their studies somewhat to keep up their social life and "that's not what I came to M.I.T. for." By then he had also dropped the job to make more time for studying. The loss of income was serious, but he said he would work the entire summer to make up for it.

Although he did as well as John Smith in terms of grades, Green did not find the academic going so easy. He studied more than 30 hours a week. For him this was a drastic increase over high school homework hours, and he experienced it as a terrific load. He slept only 7 hours a night, like Smith, but this was less sleep than he was accustomed to and he said it left him "haggard." One great difference between the two young men was that Green's 10 to 15 hours of paid work weekly had left him no time for extracurricular activity and almost none for recreation. At the same time, however, he made most of his friends on his job. There was a real esprit de corps where he worked and also an excellent quiz review for freshmen, organ­ized by one of the upperclassmen. Green said this student ex­plained physics "better than the instructor does."

Green did not complain of having to work hard, but he did say that he wished his high school had made him work more and that the courses had covered more ground:

I spent too much time on extracurricular activities. I wish my math and science courses had been a little bit more accelerated. We didn't do much math in high school. Math and science were too easy. They had people in the class who definitely wouldn't go to college so they had to hit some kind of median .... The teachers here move. They don't stop for boys who can't catch on .... The pace is extremely fast. Now I wish my high school had done this and worked faster.

There were other sources of discomfort in Green's life. He said he was supposed to receive room service but didn't, so he had to take precious time to clean his room. His schedule was so tight that he gulped his meals in 20 minute breaks from the job-a difficult feat for him, since he liked to eat slowly and sociably. He found that time pressure and the character of

8 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

dormitory life made it difficult to make friends. "If it hadn't been for the job, the boy next door would be my only friend." He was disappointed in the lack of "school spirit" at M.I.T.:

There's no school spirit as far as I can see. I think there would be if they had a football team to talk about. The boys are still talking about their high school teams.

Nevertheless, Green was happy; M.LT. was "a great school." He enjoyed the work and he got a somewhat aggressive thrill from his own competitive success:

I feel the happiest when I do very well on the quiz and anyone else does poorly.

It is clear that Green was talking about himself as well as others when he wrote in his journal: "Tech men seem to be very interested in their academic subjects and seem to thrive on heavy workloads." Physics was his most troublesome course. He greatly preferred concrete to abstract subject matter, and the "too abstract" physics course seemed to him both difficult and boring. He had some background in calculus. Chemistry he came to enjoy more and more as the year wore on. The lectures were good, he said, but best of all he liked the chemistry labs. They were "the core of the course" and gave him a chance to work with his hands, which he liked to do. Humanities was a great surprise to him. In his first interview he claimed to "abhor liberal arts subjects," but later entries in his journal pointed to a change of attitude:

I did not expect humanities to be what it is. I expected a course confined largely to the learning of historic facts and incidents-a 'cut and dry' course. However, I not only find the work of the Greek writers (that we are now reading) interesting, but find the discussions very good. We dis­cuss not the context, but the motives and patterns of behavior of the char­acters and compare them with ourselves and our emotions. At times, when the professor starts using abstract and extremely general statements, I get bored because I don't know exactly what he's talking about. However, much of the time I am interested (very) in the discussions. I especially like the homework in this course ... so far, except for theme writing, I have spent comparatively little time on humanities. However, I believe we will be having more reading assignments, which will take consider­able time. I find Thucydides' Peloponnesian WaT very slow (although interesting) reading-I wish we had read more classics in high school. I wish I had more time to read them now ... I used to read "enjoyable trash."

At the end of the first six weeks it was plain that Green had quickly mastered a problem which gave other freshmen a great deal of trouble. He was ahle to change his study habits almost

FOUR FRESHMEN 9

overnight to meet a level of academic demands entirely new in his experience. Without hesitation he put everything else aside -the opportunity to join a fraternity, social life, extracurricular activity, leisurely eating, and long hours of sleep-to implement his all-important goal of success at M.LT. Neither was he at all resentful of the need to make these sacrifices. The reward of good grades more than compensated him for what he had given up. Green himself believed that his morale was entirely de­pendent on his grades:

... sometimes, let's say on Wednesday, if I do well on the quiz, right after the quiz, well, I'll just start studying. I might study a good part of Wednesday night and all day Thursday.

We asked Green, "You mean doing well on the quiz peps you up so you feel like studying?" and he said:

Yes, it peps everybody up. I won't say who, but I'll cite one example. One person has done very poorly in his physics quizzes, and he is com­pletely despondent in that subject. He does not do any homework now in that subject. He hates it because of the poor job he's done on the quizzes. If you do a good job on the quiz, you feel wonderful. If you do a poor job, you feel terrible for quite a while .... It's good to get a good quiz mark. That will help you along. It will be conducive to getting a better mark later on. You don't get despondent.

When we reinterviewed Green in April he was still happy and considerably more relaxed. His 4.4 cum1 at midyears re­leased him from his initial tension. He said, "It was supposed to be a great school. I find that it is a great school. And now I feel that I can do it ... had me worried." He was playing base­ball every day "to get back into shape." He said he would keep it up as long as his grades didn't suffer. If they did, he would go back to his "day and night grind."

Smith and Green were both successful freshmen with high morale. But what Smith achieved with ease, Green achieved at the cost of narrowing his life down to a routine of nothing but work. This was the price he paid for a less advantageous previ­ous training. Green was atypical of freshmen in that he was able to settle down at once to a heavy academic routine when nothing in his previous school experience had prepared him for it. He possessed in ample measure the capacity to sacrifice gratifica­tions in the present for a distant goal of achievement, a capacity which many contemporary freshmen seem to lack. The pattern was valued and practiced in his family. Green was personally

t Cum (pronounced kyollme) is the abbreviation for the c;tudent's cumula­tive grade average.

10 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

familiar with long hours and hard work before he came to M.L T., though the work was on nonintellectual jobs from which he earned money to help put himself through college.

Green's desire to be graduated creditably from M.LT. was especially strong. His perspective differed from that of freshmen who sometimes wondered why they should work so hard when they had other, perhaps easier, means of entree into high occu­pational status. Green was convinced that his "open sesame" could only be a bachelor's degree from a college of top rank. At one point he wrote that if M.LT. had not accepted him he would have tried for Dartmouth or Williams, "because men from those schools seem to get the best administrative posi­tions." He felt that a degree from a high-prestige school was the sole key to the future he wanted, and he was absolutely deter­mined to have it.

PAUL TURNER

Not all freshmen were able to settle into a rigorous work rou­tine as quickly as Green. Paul Turner, for instance, had quite a struggle with this problem. Turner came to M.LT. from a small midwestern town, where his family owned a retail business. In the first six weeks he had a ten-hour-a-week job but no extra­curricular activities. His average of only 20 hours a week de­voted to study and homework was below the freshman average, but Turner was only dimly aware of the fact. His personal rhythm of living was not congenial to tight time budgeting:

After classes I go home about 4:00 or 4:30 and read the mail and relax for a while. I take my time after I get home. Talk for a while with people. A lot of time gets away that you can't account for.

Turner also had trouble concentrating, so that the hours he did put in were not efficiently used:

I can sure waste time sometimes. I have a habit of being slow. My mind wanders. Sometimes I will suddenly notice I'm not reading the book I have in front of me. I daydream instead. Sometimes I can get things done right away. When it takes me ages to do something, there's no reason for it.

Turner's daydreams were dreams of glory, like getting an A on a humanities theme. He spent a good deal of his study time enjoying success at M.LT. in fantasy. In addition to this inner distraction he was handicapped by a low reading speed and an absence of disciplined work habits:

I think the real trouble is I'm just not used to working. In high school I never worked ... I don't know how to organize things either. Some of

FOUR FRESHMEN 11

the boys can sit right down and organize thoughts for a theme. They take notes in an organized way. They organize everything just automati­cally. I never had to do that and I don't know how. So far I've been just sitting there and not taking any notes. If something looks familiar I just say to myself that looks familiar, and expect it to work out like it used to. But it doesn't. I find I don't really know it. So I'm beginning to take a lot more notes. I have to learn to apply myself and it's very hard. And it's hard to have to work so hard. It's hard to get used to it.

Calculus, which Turner had not had in high school, gave him a great deal of trouble. He said he could not understand the purpose of it and that the instructor didn't make it clear. He asked few questions in class because many freshmen had had calculus before and he didn't want to expose his ignorance. Chemistry seemed to him "a lot of unrelated things to memo­rize," and this was a task he hated. There was only one bright spot in the picture, and that was physics. Turner was doing B work in the course which the majority of freshmen found the most difficult. "It is orderly and connected," he said. "You can learn it by understanding it"; and that, to him, made it easy.

At the end of the first six weeks Turner's morale was only fair. He was still struggling hard with the "idea of calculus." Like many other freshmen he remarked that the worse he did on a quiz, the harder it became for him to study that particular subject, whereas a success sent him back to his desk with magi­cally increased energy. Despite his difficulties and some dis­couragement, however, he was full of high resolve:

We have just read the Greek tragedy, Antigone. The many ideas brought out in the first day of discussion about motives and character traits inter­ested me very much because I had not thought that much about those two things when I read plays, novels, etc., before ... I have never learned to examine motives and characters closely enough to get the true and basic purpose of the author. This is one of the many things I probably should have realized before, but I guess it's just man's nature to have to be shown something before accepting it. However, the quicker a person is to realize a fact the farther ahead he will be and the more able to pursue his aims. I am on the lookout for and intend to try to digest these things. The Institute is full of these "guideposts" for living a successful life.

When we reinterviewed Turner in April, his morale had deteriorated. He was not flunking, but his grades-aside from a stable, solid B in physics-were low enough so that he had fears of not being able to enter Electrical Engineering. Since be­coming an electrical engineer had been his heart's desire since the age of twelve, this was a serious blow. He was wondering whether he should not leave M.I.T. rather than stay and take the

12 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

risk of having to switch to another field. His father had written him a long letter urging him to stay, and this weighed heavily in the scales:

Before I discussed it with the family I thought surely that I wanted to transfer, because I feel that my record here is not going to be particularly good. If I graduate from here it will not be in very high standing in the class. So I thought I would be better off transferring. But after they said to stay here as long as I could and try to finish well, I feel differently about it. Before, I felt that if I flunked out or failed or I was told to leave, they would take this rather poorly, but since they have said stay here until I do, then I have a different feeling toward it because I feel like they are on my side more even if I do fail.

Turner himself had become more and more convinced that M.I.T. was the best engineering school anywhere to be found:

The libraries here are superior to those elsewhere. And outside of formal courses I've learned a lot by just going around and seeing what's happen­ing around the Institute in research areas and so forth. I've been to some Electrical Engineering open houses. The last open house was in a high voltage laboratory in which they demonstrated some of the experimental apparatus. And also in Building 28 they were running some accelerators. I found these displays very interesting and encouraging.

However, these very "encouraging" displays also saddened him, since they represented that which he so very much wanted and might not attain. The unresolved conflict of whether to stay or leave had apparently paralyzed Turner. He found himself in a strangely apathetic state of mind:

I had to cut down on everything. I feel like I'm being given more work and no hobbies to help me recuperate. I feel that I'd just rather lie around. I sort of lose interest in my former hobbies actually because I don't feel like it's worth going to the trouble to go out and do them. I just feel like I'd rather sit down and rest. I'd rather do nothing than anything. I have a hard time thinking of anything I'd like to do. I feel just sort of languid. That seems to be all I do, is study or do nothing. And I don't enjoy doing nothing. I have the feeling that I should be doing something hut I don't know what I should be doing. I know what I should be doing (laughs) -more studying-but I don't feel like doing it.

When the interviewer asked Turner whether he had seen any member of the faculty or administration about this problem, he said he hadn't. He didn't like to ask people for help-and he doubted that anyone could help him. Despite his B in physics, he had clearly become convinced that he didn't "have the stuff" to achieve the goal he had set himself.

Because he wasn't failing any subj ect and because he didn't turn to the staff for help, no member of the faculty or admin-

FOUR FRESHMEN 13

istration knew at the end of April that Turner was in the midst of a crisis. Whatever he was to do, he needed expert as well as mature advice. Whether he finally sought it or had it offered to him, we do not know. Turner did not return to M.LT. for the sophomore year.

HENRY JOHNSON

Henry Johnson, our fourth freshman, was the son of an en­gineer. He attended a public high school in a large city, where he made grades in the 90's with little effort. He was an outgoing, unusually articulate young man who appeared self-confident; but he had described himself in the mail questionnaire as "quite a worrier," and this proved to be indeed the case.

Johnson did average work at M.LT. by dint of very great and initially painful exertion. Secretly, however, he had hoped for much greater things, and he was deeply discontented. His unhappiness showed itself to some extent in mild nervous symptoms, but mainly his anger at the situation was directed against the Institute. At first he was freely admiring as well as critical, but his criticism became more severe and more pre­ponderant as the year wore on.

Johnson didn't come to Rush Week and at no point showed the slightest interest in fraternities. He lived in a West Campus dormitory, where he quickly made friends with the fellows in his suite and eventually with all those on his section of the floor. By the time the year ended these men formed a fairly cohesive group numbering 16 to 20 people, with a smaller group of 8 or 10 whom Johnson "went around with." He enjoyed this con­genial situation, although it caused him some conflict since he found that being in a suite resulted in less than ideal study con­ditions. Something potentially distracting was always going on. "When I want to study and there's a bridge game going, about half the time the bridge game wins out."

A number of things about Institute living irritated Johnson almost immediately. The first entry in his journal was a diatribe against R.O.T.e. He felt the Coop charged too high prices and should have some competition. He was outraged at the failure of room-cleaning service and the cutting of other services in the dormitories. He found the walk to Walker Memorial for dinner burdensome, although the food was good. The key to most of his complaints was time pressure. Johnson would scarcely have fussed so much about these matters except that they involved "wasteful" expenditures of precious time.

14 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

However, his real trouble-or what he saw as trouble-was academic. He experienced a very usual combination of difficul­ties. He had to work harder than ever before in his life. Making this change in life routine was not easy, but worse was the fact that the tremendous effort seemed to yield no reward. His grades and standing in the class were lower than he could accept. On September 30 he wrote in his journal:

The Institute is if anything a bit rougher than I had anticipated. Not in the material covered, but in the amount of time required in preparation. I have not gotten to bed before 1 :00 a.m. yet. This will soon break down almost anyone's health.

The theme of too little sleep appeared again and again. His next entry said:

I am adjusting to long hours of study, but it is most tiring. I am greatly looking forward to sleeping an extra hour in the morning; my first class is at 10.

Two days later he wrote:

This study is starting to weaken me physically. I am quite tired but look forward to the weekend to catch up on a bit of sleep. The old cliche "Tech is hell" means more and more to me every day. I love it here and I am going to do all in my power to stay here, however.

In this same entry he recorded his reaction to the grade on his first theme:

I received a D. This is a bit of a shock. Even though there was only one C+ and the rest were D's, F's and D+'s, it is a big shock to get a D when heretofore you would have been shocked with a low B.

On the following days he talked more about being tired and about the strain of the new study routine:

It is not too easy to adjust to studying in all your free time (with the noted exception of Saturday nights) when you have seldom studied at all in high school ... I find that I am becoming more and more tired during the day ... I am so sleepy that I cannot keep my eyes open until about noon each day ... I think I am gradually adjusting to the routine. It is a tremendous physical and emotional strain initially.

But he was doing it, and he felt it was worthwhile:

You study and study. You will do anything just to stay here. The stilted life of the upperclassmen even looks good to you, for you realize, as they do, what is waiting for you when you graduate. The Institute has many faults, many poor policies, but ... they are still lining up in droves ... A good name, and backed with a good product.

Later in October, however, he was "clutching" on quizzes. Although he said his grades were often higher than he expected

FOUR FRESHMEN 15

when he left the exam, he was not satisfied with them; he was in constant dread of "having to leave the Institute":

There's something wrong going on. In high school I always knew what I made on a test and here I've gotten some grades higher than I expected. I get clutched on the tests here. I never did that in high school. If you panic on one problem you can ruin the whole test ... If I have my own time, I can do a problem. But if I have a deadline, I just won't meet it even if I could. Maybe I could do it in an hour but it's knowing I have to. I just won't. I have a dread of not staying up here.

Johnson's faculty adviser, whom he liked very much and went to see often, assured him that his work was average and that he would not flunk out. But flunking out was not what Johnson feared, although he verbalized the problem in those terms. On October 25 he said, "I'm shooting for above the class average and I'm not making it." On October 30, according to his journal, the grind was beginning to be too much for him. This was the first time he mentioned the possibility of leaving the Institute under his own steam:

I was snowed, as usual, in calc today. I am sick and tired of not under­standing the stuff. It is a cinch I never will if they keep up at the rapid­fire rate they are going now. I am considering most seriously a switch to another school at the end of the semester. I did not come to college to play but to learn, but I want to have a little fun with the education also. So far here it has been absolutely nil. I have now formulated my philos­ophy, confirmed by several upperclassmen: The only way that you "adjust" to the Institute is to acknowledge the fact that you never will. It keeps getting rougher and rougher and the upperclassmen say that it will get rougher all the way through. I honestly don't know how I am going to hold out. If I work like this I think I can pass, but I keep asking myself, Is this the way that you want to live for the next four years? and keep answering, No!

In an interview on November 7, his real goals emerged gradually as he talked. First he seemed to be saying that he just wanted to perform at the class average:

Undoubtedly it figures [in my wanting to leave] that I'm below the class average. Everyone warned me about that. I thought I was prepared for it. I had expected to get B's. I thought that would be about the middle of the class. Actually to be in the middle of the class is a C ... If only you knew where you stood it might help. If I knew now I was going to make all C's or above.

But he ended the interview with this revealing passage:

I could probably be making B's and I wouldn't be satisfied. I'd be mad at myself and wanting to get A's ... I've always been on top and I want to be on top. A good friend of mine is going to Notre Dame ... I always did better than he in high school. He's got an 84 average up there. That's

16 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

very good for Notre Dame. It infuriates me that I'm not going to come near his average. I don't see why I'm not doing it. I understand the stuff and all the tests. I would prefer to drop out of here ... Years ago I said to myself, I'm going to get A's at M.I.T. I can't. I guess I'd rather get A's somewhere else.1

When we reinterviewed Johnson in April, he was in much the same state of mind, at least superficially. He was still com­plaining of too little sleep. The tuition increase annoyed him and supplied another reason for not coming back to M.I.T. His second semester instructors were not as good as those he had had first semester; he had taken to cutting recitation sections and sometimes lectures. He was not enjoying his work at all. The pace was so fast, he claimed, that he could barely keep up with the assigned work. He had no time to explore on his own a few things that particularly interested him:

In high school, what I didn't learn I did on my own. I did books on my own but in limits! I had all the fun I wanted and it was sort of a conquest. I had a tremendously inquisitive type of mind, and they've suc­ceeded in killing all the inquisitiveness .... Say like, math .... I have my troubles with it but I like to prowl around with it a little bit more as we go along. And maybe get a couple of other sources on it, you know. But we're moving so fast, you don't have time to do what they're doing . . . . One particular segment we're doing in physics is fascinating .... It's kinetic gases. I'd like to spend the whole semester on it, can't very well.

Later he said that the lack of opportunity to explore at his leisure had made the work boring for him:

Hacking is the word for it. It wouldn't have to be boring if it were pre· sented differently and could be covered a little more thoroughly. When you've got to race through it, why you just lose interest. Why bother?

Johnson was still determined to leave M.I.T. His nervousness had grown worse:

I'm practically a chain smoker now. I discovered to my dismay that I'm biting my fingernails .... I've been running around nervous, jumpy. living in dread of the next quiz.

However, one important change of attitude had taken place by April. At midyear his grades had been slightly above the class average. At the beginning of the second semester they rose still higher and his morale soared. Now the pace had caught up with him again and he was in a slump. His goal for the end of the year was to do as well as he had at midyear.

1 Emphasis added.

FOUR FRESHMEN 17

Johnson himself realized that this was a change from his previous attitude:

Had I known at the first of the term what my ratings at the end of the term were going to be, I would have been satisfied with them. Normally I wouldn't have been, but after a term here I was satisfied with them."

He had lowered his aspiration level to a place where his goal was attainable. He was no longer hoping for the A's which were out of reach, but for the average or slightly better-than­average performance which he had already turned in. From the standpoint of his personal adjustment to M.LT., no more important change could have occurred. Once he gave up his need to be "on top," there was probably nothing to prevent Johnson from having a reasonably satisfying career at M.I.T. At any rate, despite his repeated threats not to return, he was back for the sophomore year.

1 Emphasis added.

CHAPTER 2 THE ENTERING FRESHMAN: A COLLECTIVE PROFILE

The portraits of four freshmen have illustrated key experiences which occur often during the first year at M.I.T. Soon we shall look at our cross-sectional samplings to find how these experi­ences were actually distributed in the Class of '61. Before doing so, however, we must give the reader a sketch of the people we will be talking about. This chapter describes some character­istics of the students' families and secondary school training and highlights certain of the expectations which they brought with them to college.

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FRESHMAN CLASS

The great majority of the Class of 1961-94 per cent-were American born; the remaining 6 per cent came from the four corners of the world. Of those born in the United States, the class was heavily weighted with New Englanders (21 per cent of the class, as compared with 6 per cent of the total U.S. population), and students from the mid-Atlantic states (37 per cent, as compared with 20 per cent of the U. S. population).1 Since these regions of heavy recruitment to M.I.T. include the most industrialized sections of the nation, the students were a

1 For a complete breakdown of the regional distribution of the class, see Sussmann and Levine, op. cit., p. 44. The figures for the U. S. population come from the 1950 census, unless otherwise indicated.

18

THE ENTERING FRESHMAN 19

heavily urban and even metropolitan group. Forty-six per cent of the American-born students, as compared with less than a third of the total U.S. population, came from cities with a population of half a million or more; half of these, however, resided in the suburbs of large cities rather than in the urban centers proper. Ten per cent of the class, as compared with 7.9 per cent of all Americans, came from towns of less than 10,000 population; but only 5 per cent, as compared with 36 per cent of all Americans, came from rural areas.!

The diversity of ethnic origins which prevails in our Eastern seaboard metropolitan areas was reflected among the freshmen. Of those who were American citizens, one-fifth (as compared with 25 per cent of the total U.S. population) were first- or second-generation Americans; about a third were third-genera­tion Americans; and 43 per cent were fourth generation or more.

Along with diversity of ethnic origins went religious diver­sity. Of the American citizens in the class, 55 per cent were Protestant, 24 per cent Jewish, and 20 per cent Catholic. (One per cent either did not answer the question or had no religious affiliation.) There are at least two reasons for the heavy repre­sentation of Jews, who make up less than 4 per cent of the total U.s. population. One is the proximity of M.I.T. to New York City, where some 40 per cent of American Jews reside. Another is the general tendency of Jews to be represented out of propor­tion to their total number in centers of higher learning. Studies in several cities have shown that three to six times as many Jews obtain a higher education as non-Jews of similar income level. 2

Catholics, who make up 26 to 27 per cent of the U.S. popula­tion, are represented in about this proportion in the Class of '6l. To a greater extent than either Jews or Protestants, Catholics tend to be concentrated at the income levels which send rela­tively few sons to college. That they are well represented in the freshman class can probably be attributed to the heavy concen­trations of Catholic population in the regions from which M.I.T. recruits most heavily.

The great bulk of the young men who entered M.I.T. in Sep­tember. 1957, were 17 or 18 years old. Although 85 per cent were "unattached" and only 14 per cent were "going steady,"

1 For a complete breakdown of the class by size of home community, see ibid, p. 45.

~ l\larshal Sklare, ed. The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Pre!"s, 1958), pp. 143-149.

20 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

they reflected the current trend toward early marriage, at least in their intentions. Thirty-nine per cent said they expect~d to marry between the ages of 22 and 24, and another 40 per cent said they would take this step between the ages of 25 and 27. The interviews revealed a possible connection between these plans and the reluctance of some students to finance their educa­tion through loans. They said that the prospect of haviIl:g to pay off a loan might be tolerable if they had only themselves to think about, but they balked at the idea of saddling a young marriage with the burden of their educational debt.

To describe the socioeconomic strata of American society from which the Class of '61 was recruited, we have three indi­cators: their fathers' occupations, their family incomes, and their fathers' educational levels. Occupation, income, and education are broadly interrelated in American society-a high rating on one scale tending to go along with a high rating on the other two.

The M.I.T. freshmen were recruited heavily from families in the upper ranges of the occupational pyramid.! Not only working-class sons but also the sons of lower-level white collar workers were little represented by comparison with their num­bers in the U.S. population. There is, however, an interesting exception. The sons of skilled workers-machinists, carpenters, electricians, and the like---were represented in the class almost in proportion to their numbers in the population. It is quite likely that engineering is the first choice of profession for young men from skilled workers' families who are trying to rise in the occupational system. Familiarity with the world of technology through contact with their fathers' work may make such a choice natural for them. It is likely, too, that the fathers themselves have some contact with engineers in their work. Meeting them as occupational superiors but sharing with them certain inter­ests and skills, they may well think of the engineer as a next step up in the world.

If we compare the education of the freshmen's fathers with that of all American men of their generation, we find that the middle educational level-fathers with high school education­was represented proportionally to its numbers in the popula­tion; but fathers with only a grammar school education were very much less frequent than in the total population, and fathers with a college education or more were very much more frequent. 2

1 See Table AI, Appendix. 2 See Table A3, Appendix.

THE ENTERING FRESHMAN 21

Thus far we have seen that M.I.T. freshmen of 1957-58 were recruited from families which ranked well above the population average with respect to occupational status and educational level. When we turn to income, we find that the average for freshmen's families was higher than the population average.1

However, these families represent a sector of the middle class which wants higher education for its children but which often has not the ability to pay. Only 19 per cent of the freshmen said that their families would finance the whole of their M.LT. edu­cation. Eighteen per cent were planning to help out with their own summer earnings, and 63 per cent were dependent on other aid. Of the last group, three-fourths had scholarships of some kind (not necessarily from M.LT.); 48 per cent had jobs dur­ing the school year; and 26 per cent had loans. Students about to enter M.LT. claimed that it would be "somewhat difficult" or "very difficult" to finance their four years at M.LT.

The upper-middle-class group so well represented among the freshmen is known to be politically conservative. As expected, both the students and their parents showed a heavy preference for Republican over Democratic voting. More interesting was the fact that the freshmen were more Republican than their parents; that is, many students reported that their parents habitually voted Democratic but that they themselves preferred the Republicans. This trend held within a number of subgroups. For instance, when we divided the student body by religion, we found, as in the population at large, that the Jews were most heavily Democratic in preference, the Catholics next, and the Protestants most Republican. But within all three religious groups, the M.LT. freshmen were more likely than their parents to prefer the Republicans to the Democrats. Recent studies of political behavior have shown that young people who are mov­ing up in the occupational structure tend to abandon the politics of their families and to adopt the politics of the class into which they are moving.2 Engineers, who are closely allied with the business community, are a traditionally conservative group. Here we see that many of the entering freshmen have already abandoned the political traditions of their families to adopt the pattern of political preference which will help them fit into the climate of their future occupation.

1 See Table A2, Appendix.

:' Herhert H. Hyman, Political Socialization (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Pre~l:'. 1959), pp. 109-111.

22 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

HIGH SCHOOL BACKGROUNDS

Eighty per cent of the freshmen who entered M.I.T. in the fall of 1957 had attended public high schools; 5 per cent had gradu­ated from parochial schools; and the remaining 15 per cent came from nonparochial private schools. Most of the individual high school classes contained between 20 and 40 pupils. In his senior year at high school the typical freshman had spent more time in extracurricular activities than in study and homework outside the classroom.

TABLE 1 TIME GIVEN TO STUDY, HOMEWORK, AND EXTRACURRIC-

ULAR ACTIVITIES I"i THE SENIOR YEAR AT HIGH SCHOOL

Time per week to study and homework Under 10 hours 10-14 hours 15-20 hours More than 20 hours

Total Total number*

Time per week to extracurricular activities and hobbies Under 10 hours 10-19 hours 20-29 hours 30 or more hours

Total Total number

Per cent of freshmen 24 27 31 18

100% (810)

Per cent of freshmen 10 33 31 26

100~~ (805)

* In all of our tables, "total num ber" means the total number of students who answered the question.

Entering freshmen had averaged six or seven extracurricular activities apiece during their last high school year,! and these were richly varied. They included not only the scientific and technical hobbies one would expect to find among these young men but also dramatics, music, painting, debating, school j our­nalism, and work in community service organizations, as well as social groups and sports. When they were asked to name the three books which had impressed them most deeply during the previous year, 55 per cent of the entering freshmen mentioned works of serious literature-novels, poetry, and essays; 48 per cent mentioned what might roughly be designated as "middle­brow" literature-for example, a novel by Pearl Buck; 20 per

1 This figure should probably be revised downward since, by the time they are accepted in college, these experienced applicants have learned to make themselves appear as "well rounded" as the record will permit. They do this, of course, because a wide range of extracurricular interests is a criterion of admission to many colleges. Even allowing for this kind of exaggeration, however, the number of extracurricular activities reported was high.

THE ENTERING FRESHMAN 23

cent mentioned books on mathematics and science; and 27 per cent mentioned history and biography. Asked to name the two magazines to which they would most like to subscribe, 64 per cent mentioned news magazines; 31 per cent mentioned serious science journals; 31 per cent mentioned middlebrow general magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest); and 22 per cent mentioned popular science journals. These figures hardly convey a picture of young men with narrowly technical and scientific concerns.

EXPECTATIONS OF M.LT.

M.LT. had a definite reputation among the freshmen before they arrived. Much that they had heard was favorable, but some unfavorable images were also fairly widespread. M.I.T.'s "good reputation"-the things which attracted them here-cen­tered on its academic excellence. Eighty per cent of the fresh­men mentioned academic prestige as a reason for being attracted to M.LT. The other major facets of the good reputation had to do with the excellence of the faculty and of laboratory facilities.

M.LT.'s "bad reputation" was partly the other side of the same coin. Thirty-four per cent of the students considered the fact that the Institute is academically "tough" an unattractive feature. However, the unattractive features most often men­tioned were the allegations that the Institute is too large and im­personal, that it is not collegiate enough, and that its living facilities are not as pleasant as they might be.

Almost every entering freshman expected to find the work at M.LT. "somewhat" or "very much" more difficult than his high school work. Freshmen also anticipated receiving less individual help and attention from instructors than they had been accus­tomed to receive in high school. Nevertheless, the freshmen underestimated, by their own later accounts, the amount of time they would have to devote to their studies at the Institute.

More than half the class, before they came, expected to study 29 hours per week or less; but in May, 64 per cent of the class was putting in 30 or more hours. Only 11 per cent had antici­pated studying 40 hours or more; but in May, 27 per cent were actually doing so. In complementary fashion, the students over­estimated the amount of time they would have free for extra­curricular activity. Thus, despite the popular slogan "Tech is hell," expressed earlier by Johnson and known to nearly every entering freshman, the students did not have, before they came

24 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

to M.LT., a realistic idea of how much work they would have to do.

TABLE 2 AMOUNT OF TIME STUDENTS PLANNED TO GIVE TO

STUDY AND HOMEWORK AT M.LT. AND AMOUNT OF TIME THEY ACTUALLY GAVE

Under 15 hours 15 - 19 hours 20 - 24 hours 25 - 29 hours 30 - 34 hours 35 - 39 hours 40 - 45 hours More than 45 hours

Total number

Plans as of Behavior in August,1957 May, 1958 Per cent of freshmen Per cent of freshmen 1 4 4 4

20 12 30 16 22 20 12 17 11 18

100% (789)

9

100% (139) *

* As stated above, we interviewed only a random sample of the class in May. The figures in the right column are derived from the sample.

Before they arrived at M.LT., the freshmen were asked where they expected to rank in their class and also where they hoped to rank. Ninety-six per cent expected to be at least in the top half of the class, and 99 per cent hoped to be at least that high in rank. Expectations and aspirations concerning one's own per­formance are mainly determined by past experience. The enter­ing classes at M.LT., as at all first-rate colleges, have behind them a consistent experience of very high performance relative to their peers. Even though they "knew" that they were enter­ing an environment which would present them with much greater competition than they had ever had before, they did not make any sharp downward adjustments in their aspiration levels in advance. Such adjustments were made only after the new environment had been experienced and the freshmen had had an opportunity to measure themselves on the new scale. In Chapter 6 we shall see the shifts in aspiration level this "reality testing" eventually produced.

In contrast to the secondary schools attended by most of the freshmen, M.LT. places considerable responsibility on the stu­dent for his own academic progress. The mail questionnaire included a few questions intended to elicit the students' feelings about such a policy. The replies showed the freshmen, in antici­pation, quite strongly in favor of academic independence. For instance, when asked whether they would prefer a learning situ-

THE ENTERING FRESHMAN 25

ation "in which the instructors assumed primary responsibility

for showing you what must be learned" or one "in which the

primary responsibility for selecting what is important is given

to you, with the instructors available for guidance when needed," 68 per cent chose the latter alternative. When asked

how they felt about the senior thesis, an overwhelming majority

favored it, and 77 per cent said they would like to have an

opportunity to do some independent work of this sort earlier

than the senior year.

The wish for independence did not carryover into pianning

the program of study. When freshmen were asked about their

preference5 for a curriculum with many required subjects as

against one with much elective freedom, two-thirds of the stu­

dents preferred a curriculum which required all the subjects

necessary for thorough preparation in their occupational fields.

This is an area in which they evidently preferred to depend on

faculty judgment. We shall see in the next chapter that by May

even the preference for academic independence in individual

courses changed considerably.

Several items in the mail questionnaire bore on the fresh­

men's preferences for the pure as compared with the applied

scientific pursuits. Only 34 per cent planned to be scientists, as

compared to 57 per cent who planned to be engineers; but of

the latter group, half said they wanted to go into research and

development rather than design and construction or administra­

tion. When they were asked what school subJects interested

them most, 27 per cent of these high school graduates chose

mathematics, 42 per cent chose physical science, and only 29

per cent chose engineering. (The subiects were presented in a check list.) This distribution may be due in part to the students'

lack of past experience with the study of engineering. However, two other questions support the view that the freshrnpn pre­

ferred-or thought they preferred-the theoretical to the

applied side of scientific activity. Asked whether they got more

gratification out of finding the solutions to practical or theo­retical problems, more than two-thirds of the freshmen chose the latter (Table 3). And asked whether they would most enjoy the satisfaction of a scientific, an engineering, or an administrative achievement, a majority of freshmen chose the

scientific (Table 4) .

26 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

TABLE 3 GHATTFICATION FHOM SOLVING THEOHETICAL

""ND PHACTICAL PHOBLEMS

Which of the following gives you greater pleasure? Per cent of freshmen An experience like suddenly seeing the solution to a mathematical problem or grasping a relationship for the first time. 69 An experience like figuring out a new and more efficient way of getting something done. 31

Total 100% Total number (793)

TABLE 4 TYPE OF ACHIEVEMENT WHICH WOULD BE

MOST GHATIFYING

I would like to crack a problem like discovering the principle of the transistor or the mechanism for stor-

Per cent of freshmen

ing light energy in the first step of photosynthesis. 58 I would like to design the first rocket to the moon or build the first tunnel under the English Channel. 28 I would like to create an organization where condi­tions would be ideal for scientists and engineers to do research and develop uses for their discoveries. 14

Total 100% Total number (809)

SOURCES OF INFORMATION ABOUT M.LT.

We have described the picture which entering freshmen had of M.LT. before they came here. On what was the picture based? Essentially, the young men about to enter the Institute had two sources of information: people and print. The people con­sisted of students already enrolled at M.I.T. and of M.LT. grad­uates. The print meant mainly the official M.LT. catalogues. As one would expect, the entering freshmen who depended mainly on people for their information had slightly less rosy anticipa­tions than those who depended mainly on printed materials issued by the Institute. The former put more emphasis on M.LT.'s "bad reputation": the academic difficulties and the alleged lack of collegiate atmosphere. They also had a some­what fuller knowledge about the school; for instance, they were more likely to know what the cum is and how it is reckoned.

Surprisingly, the difference in expectations between these two groups was very small. Since bulletins published by M.LT. must, in the nature of the case, paint a favorable picture of undergraduate life, we are probably dealing with a tendency for M.LT. students and graduates to paint a favorable picture, too. However much he may gripe "within the family," the upper­classman who talks to a youngster thinking of coming to M.LT. probably emphasizes the positive. We are aware of the impres-

THE ENTERING FRESHMAN 27

sion of some student officers that upperclassmen transmit a cynical attitude toward the Institute to freshmen newly arrived. This is not inconsistent with what we are saying. One is reminded of the story about the soul choosing between heaven and hell; finding that heaven looks too quiet and hell appears much livelier, he decides to go to the latter. Only after he has been admitted to hell does he learn that he will suffer the tor­tures of the damned. When he protests, "Yesterday it looked like one big party," the residents tell him, "Then you were a tourist; now you're a native." Probably the upperclassman does not talk to tourists and natives in quite the same way.

CHAPTER 3 AT THE END OF THE YEAR

In May, 1958, just before final examinations, we had our last contact with the Class of '61. At that time we conducted per­sonal interviews with a random sample of the class.l The inter­views had three purposes: (1) to provide an over-all picture of how the freshmen viewed M.LT. at this point in their careers; (2) to measure the morale of the freshmen; and (3) to obtain information about factors which we believed to be causally related to high and low morale. This chapter describes those results of the May survey which fall under the first point.

EVALUATIONS OF M.LT.

In the summer of 1957, students ahout to become freshmen at the school of their choice quite naturally had favorable attitudes toward it. Asked what they had heard about M.LT. that made it seem "attractive" and "unattractive," 54 per cent mentioned

1 We drew both a random and a stratified sample. We had hypothesized that grades were an important factor in morale, and it was clear in advance that a random sample of the size we were using would not include enough high-performing students for statistical meaningfulness when we wanted to compare those with high and low grades. To solve this problem. we first drew a random sample. Then we stratified the class by midyear grades and drew additional cases at random in the high performance category. The latter cases are only used when high- and low-performing students are being compared.

28

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 29

more attractive than unattractive features; 42 per cent balanced their comments evenly; and 4 per cent weighted their comments unfavorably. The average number of attractive features men­tioned was 2.4 and of unattractive features, 1.1.

By May the class had of course become somewhat more critical of its new environment. Asked at that time what they liked most and least about M.LT., 48 per cent mentioned more features they liked than disliked; 37 per cent balanced their comments evenly; and 15 per cent mentioned more things they disliked than liked. The average number of favorable com­ments was 2.6 and of unfavorable comments, 2.4.

Since these spontaneous comments are the only measure of morale that we have for both August, 1957, and May, 1958, it is of particular interest to note the shifts which took place among students whose attitudes were studied at both times. Using the ratio of favorable to unfavorable comments as the indicator, 34 per cent of the students had moved in an unfavor­able direction; 22 per cent had shifted in a favorable direction; and 44 per cent apportioned their comments the same way in Mayas they did before entering. In other words, while a third of the freshmen approved of M.I.T. somewhat less at the end of the year than they had at the beginning, almost as many approved of it more, and a plurality felt about the same.

More interesting than the fact that students had become more or less critical of M.I.T. were the specific changes in the character of the comments. In Tables 5 and 6 the percentages indicate the proportion of the total number of students who made each comment. When comparable types of comments were made in the two periods, they are placed side by side for easy comparison. Comments made in May which had no counterpart in the responses of the previous August are listed separately.

The decline in references to M.LT.'s academic prestige and to good career opportunities for graduates is not surprising. As an "insider," the freshman pays less attention to these things; they undoubtedly become important again when he graduates. References to excellent laboratory facilities declined because freshmen did not have much opportunity to use them. As one boy put it, "There's not enough time to play around with the apparatus and get acquainted with it-three people are using the same apparatus."

The drop in favorable comments about the faculty occurred for a variety of reasons. Frequent opinions were that freshmen

30 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

courses were not well taught, that the faculty were primarily interested in research, or that M.LT. was primarily a graduate institution. The most notable increase on the negative side was the large number of students who found M.I.T. impersonal and lacking in school spirit. Freshmen who talked about imperson­ality emphasized the difficulty of getting to know and be known by other people, both students and faculty.

TABLE 5 FAVORABLE COMMENTS ABOUT M.LT. IN AUGUST, 1957, AND IN

MAY, 1958*

High academic reputation Good career opportunities for graduates Excellence of faculty Excellence of curriculum Excellence of facilities, equipment Broadness of curriculum A ttractions of the Boston area Far from home (as a favorable comment) Favorable reference to living facilities (including the freedom, non-restrictiveness of dormitory rules) Opportunities for extracurricular activity and social life Individual attention to students Fraternity life Positive comments on the "hard work" Positive comments on the quality of other students Inteller:tually stimulating Other (miscellaneous) Total number

August, 1957 80% 19% 29% 20% 29%

9% 14% 2%

16(,7,)

19% 7(;1

10

(799)

May, 1958 210/0

4% 16% 36% 14% 6% 8% 2%

40%

20% 9% 7%

12%

25% 24% 14%

(139)

TABLE 6 . UNFAVORABLE COMMENTS ABOUT M.LT. IN AUGUST, 1957, AND

IN MAY, 1958*

Heavy academic requirements Stiff competition High costs Negative reference to curriculum (not broad enough) "Too large," "too cold," "too impersonal" Not "collegiate" enough Neglect of "average" student Negative reference to living facilities Negative reference to faculty Negative comment on specific courses Criticism of quiz system Too much emphasis on grades Undergraduate education is neglected (by comparison with graduate education) Negative comments about other students Too much independence given to students Student morale is low Other (miscellaneous) Total numher

August,1957 May, 1958 34% 410/0

3% 1% 11% 9%

11% 11 C;{) 13% 2%

11% 3%

(799)

9(;;;) 22% 51%

1% 15% 30% 15% 12% 11%

11% 9% 4% 301

/0

20% (139)

* Columns add to more than 100 per cent because most students made more than one comment.

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 31

On the positive side, the largest rise in favorable comments had to do with living facilities. However, we shall see later that this was accounted for by the students' enthusiasm for the lack of rules and restrictions in dormitory life. Had it not been for the frequently expressed approval of this policy, the favorable comments on living facilities would have declined rather than rIsen.

The remainder of this chapter will discuss in detail the chief attitudes expressed by the freshmen at the end of their first year.

TEACHING AND TEACHERS

The decline between August and May in favorable references to the faculty, combined with the increase in negative comments, reflected a real disappointment on the part of some freshmen. They came to M.LT. eagerly anticipating a great faculty. At the end of the year some felt they had had unusually fine teaching, but others were bitter because it seemed to them that freshman courses were assigned to the least qualified teachers:

The quality of the teaching is not as good as I thought. A lot of the instructors are graduate students and I feel I'm not getting what I'm paying for. The graduate students' teaching isn't good for the under­graduates. The graduate students get the best teachers.

Because of the graduate students I don't feel I'm getting what I should be getting scholastically. I should be getting full professors or associate professors. Graduate students know their subjects but can't teach too well.

However, criticism of instructors merely on the ground that they were graduate students was not universal:

Every week I tear up about 35 to 40 questions which go unanswered because no one is willing to take the time or trouble to answer them. In general I have found graduate students to be more obliging than pro­fessors on this.

Another common criticism was that the faculty was less inter­ested in teaching than in research. Closely tied to this was the belief that M.LT. is primarily a graduate institution:

It would be better to go to a school with less prestige and more teachers who aren't doing research. Their great interest is research, and teaching is very secondary to them. They don't have to waste good instructors on freshmen and sophomores. They trade on their good reputation. They know that the students will keep coming here anyhow.

32 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

They are more concerned with industry and government projects than with having an excellent educational institution. They just aren't primarily concerned with their undergraduate school. They're basically a graduate school. They're very strong on that. They're much less interested in undergraduate education than in research. I don't see how they could deny it if talking to an impartial group.

In their May interviews, freshmen were asked to discuss what they found good or bad about the instruction in their indi­vidual courses. The form of this question left the students free to answer in any terms they chose. With only occasional excep­tions they agreed that their instructors had a masterful com­mand of their subjects. But they felt there was great variation in the skill with which the material was presented. In lecture courses the freshmen liked a presentation which seemed system­atic and well ordered:

I had one lecturer last term that I liked much better than the one this term . . . he had a very organized way about it. You come into the lecture and he'll pose a question, and this is what he does all the way through the lecture. He'll ask a question and then he'll go on and answer the question and it's very interesting because you've asked these questions, too. The other one, there doesn't seem to be too much organization to it. He just goes on and then he'll skip back and pick up something that he missed and then he'll do that and then he'll go on.

Lecturers were sometimes criticized for going too fast or taking too much for granted:

He knows his subject but doesn't teach it well. He goes too fast and doesn't give enough explanation. He doesn't repeat anything once he does it and he should repeat occasionally.

He expects you to see difficult concepts intuitively. His favorite comment is, "It is intuitively obvious that ... " This is a hairy expression. He knows the subject, though.

Although they usually did so apologetically, many students also mentioned the importance of the lecturer's voice and dic­tion. An instructor who couldn't be heard or understood or whose voice was monotonous either irritated them or put them to sleep. And finally, a very important factor was the instructor's own apparent enthusiasm or lack of interest. Both attitudes com­municated themselves to the class:

He's interested in the subject. He won't give up 'til we understand. Also he has a sense of humor, which helps.

He puts the material over. He covers everything or else tells you what isn't important; makes it humorous occasionally. He doesn't act bored with teaching, and he prepares his lectures.

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 33

He doesn't have a serious attitude toward the subject matter. Too light, as if he doesn't consider it important. That feeling gets over to the class. He says himself he doesn't care too much about certain aspects of the subject and makes us disinterested, too.

He's there because he has to be, not because he wants to be, and he makes the fact obvious.

In these quotations the students indicated that the lecturer's boredom either with the subject or with teaching disturbed them. In recitation sections-and here we include calculus classes-the most important characteristic of an instructor in the eyes of the students was likewise the degree of concern he showed to help them grasp the content of the course:

He's the opposite of the other instructor. He takes an interest in the class. He's familiar with everyone. He made an effort to get to know them. He discusses with people individually if they show signs of not understanding the material. He initiates conferences. In the beginning of the term he made an effort to learn the nicknames of every student in the class. You feel he's interested in what you're doing.

Since freshmen, for fear of exposing themselves, were afraid to ask too many questions in class, they liked instructors who took the initiative and checked to make sure that they were understood. They were also grateful to escape scorn:

He's a good one. He presents the material well, goes through it in minute detail. He asks the class at every step if they understand.

He will go into fine points. Other instructors skip over points. He never looks at you like you are an idiot.

The "bad" recitation instructor was the one who had the opposite qualities from these. He took few pains to find out whether he was understood:

He rips through explanations without seeing whether the class under­stands. Only one-third of the class shows up.

He only tries to explain a couple of times and then if we don't get it, he says to hell with it and leaves us in the cold.

He did not appear to have prepared for class:

He's a nice fellow and knows the subject but he doesn't prepare ... He just gets up-holds the book in one hand, writes a few things out of the book and makes a few extraneous remarks. He doesn't seem to be freshly familiar with the material.

He doesn't prepare for class. He comes to class and says, "Where are we today?"

Or else he conceived of the recitation section as a place for answering students' questions, with none of the initiative coming from him:

34 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

He doesn't put any preparation into it at all. Just comes in and asks if anyone has any questions.

He often talked above the students' heads:

He digresses to higher branches that are beyond me. He talks about them without explaining.

A lot of times he doesn't take into consideration the amount of math we've had. Class is a waste of time because I haven't had the math he's using.

He was sarcastic with students who had difficulty:

He gets awfully impatient with those who don't understand. If you don't know, you're scared to let him know.

Often it appeared to the freshmen that the instructor was bored with having to teach:

He takes little interest in students. He knows no one's name. He has never asked a failing student to visit him.

He acts as though it were unbearable for him to come three hours a week and talk about this subject to freshmen.

The crux of the matter seems to have been, "He doesn't care":

He never seems to have time to do the homework problems himself. He doesn't seem to take an interest in what we're learning or not learning or an interest in the course itself.

He appears to be doing us a favor by coming to class. He doesn't do problems but calls on people from class to do them. Then he doesn't

bother to correct errors on the board or even to check them, so the class often memorizes procedures or problems wrong.

Humanities is conducted somewhat differently from other courses. The students defined it as a discussion course, and they evaluated instructors mainly in terms of how well they led discussions. The "good" humanities instructor elicited much student participation but at the same time knew how to keep everyone to the point and make the interplay of ideas lead somewhere:

He senses what is interesting to students and gets good discussion. He doesn't pull apart students' suggestions but keeps the discussion on the subject, tactfully.

Very smart. He knows his study inside out. He knows how to lead and handle classroom discussion in the right direction. I guess he knows student psychology, too.

He insists on class participation and makes it really interesting by playing student against student.

He is able to talk with students in our own language. He's not a stuffed shirt about it, very relaxed and at ease in class and humorous. He's good, too, at summarizing and explaining the main points of the authors we read. Contrary to my last term's teacher.

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 35

The "bad" humanities instructor was, first, the one who allowed the discussion to wander in a seemingly aimless way:

He leaves too much to students. He could do more guiding on big points. Otherwise you're liable to get too far off the track.

He doesn't really teach a lot. He just encourages discussion sometimes. He doesn't discuss what's in the book but goes on to things that seem unimportant. Discussion turns to little facts no one ever thinks about again. It's just pretty worthless.

Another type of "bad" humanities instructor was one who lectured a great deal and seemed too insistent on imposing his own opinions on the class:

Humanities should be mostly discussion, but he has the idea that he should lecture and give his ideas.

He won't accept any opinions except his own. Questions in class which should provoke discussion, he shuts off with his opinion. This is bad.

He talks all the time. He's opinionated. You have to write what he likes to hear. You can't disagree with him.

In a faculty where intellectual qualifications are uniformly high, the students perceived the difference between good and bad teaching as depending on the instructor's enjoyment of teaching rather than on his competence in his field. Occasionally an instructor appeared to be interested in teaching well but unable to do so. Far more often, however, the freshmen felt that instructors who liked to teach actually taught well, whereas those who disliked teaching taught poorly.

Freshmen, of course, have no adequate conception of the competing demands on their instructors' energies. The less they understood the faculty's situation the more inclined they were to blame individual faculty members for poor teaching. Those who recognized that the instructor's own career situation might put a higher premium on research than on teaching were more inclined to blame the "system." A few indicated their belief that the needs of an undergraduate school and a university were quite different; they felt that undergraduates needed instructors whose prime commitment was to teaching and that scientific brilliance was less important. Such a well-worked-out position on this controversial issue, however, was rare. What was quite usual was the distinction which students made between scientific competence and teaching competence. As one said, "You don't have to be brilliant to be a good teacher."

36 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

EVALUATION OF COURSES

At a point midway through their May interviews, the freshman respondents were asked to rate each of their courses in terms of interest and difficulty. The questions forced a choice among the alternatives: "very interesting," "fairly interesting," or "not interesting"; and "very difficult," "fairly difficult," and "not difficult." The interest ratings of required freshman courses are shown in Table 7.

It is clear that the physics lecture course was found the most interesting and the chemistry lecture least interesting. However, the students saw the relative dullness of freshman chemistry as more or less inherent in the nature of the material. It had to be memorized, it was not exciting, but this was no one's fault.

TABLE 7 FRESHMA;\f INTEREST IN REQUIRED COURSES

'" £ >..>-.. ;..., .~ "l .... .... .... ::l ...., 0

tl ~ "l 0 .~ .. ~ QJ '" ..... ~ .~ ~

(.) .... E: ~

......... .~ E tl ..:::; '" ::l ~ "' .... ~ 0 ;., .... ;.,0

I::! ~ '-' ...c::..c ~ '-' ~..c

:t: I...; ~~ 1...;":: Q...."::: Q....~

Very interesting 43°~) 9% 30°;, 52% 33% 44% Fairly interesting 47 34 45 41 51 40 Not interesting 10 57 25 7 16 16

100% 1000~) 100% 100o~) 100% 100% Total number (136) (134) (34) (138) (135) (139)

Physics, which was most frequently rated as "very interest­ing," was also most frequently rated as "very difficult." It was also the course in which students most often found the pace "too fast" and themselves repeatedly "snowed." Humanities was rated second to physics in degree of difficulty. Calculus was rated the least difficult course. This is possibly explained by the students' claim that their high school preparation in mathematics was more adequate for M.LT. than their prepara­tion in physics, chemistry, or reading and writing skills. Sixty­seven per cent said that their high school mathematics training was "good," while only 22 per cent said this of high school physics and 40 per cent of the other three areas.

TABLE 8 FRESHMAN RATI;\fGS OF THE DIFFICULTY OF REQUIRED COURSES

Very difficult Somewhat difficult Not difficult

Total number

Chemistry Physics Calculus lecture lecture 2°,/ o

46 52

100% (136)

9% 25% 51 57 40 18

100% (134)

1000~) (137)

Humanities 14% 49 37

100% (138)

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 37

Despite their critical attitude toward the teaching, many freshmen commented enthusiastically about the content of their courses. Back horne for vacation they had talked to students at other schools, compared the ground covered, and found with pride that they were moving faster and learning more:

We're all prejudiced because we know other schools don't cover what we do. We know it has to be difficult.

Any person who comes here will find that his expectations on academic work are fulfilled. You can study anything you want to; there is ample opportunity. I haven't been disappointed with what I've received as far as school work goes.

DEPENDENCE AND INDEPENDENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

The freshmen found themselves academically on their own to a degree new in their experience. Whether this is good or bad for them is a question we shall not attempt to deal with, but we can report that they had great difficulty in adjusting to it. They would have preferred to depend more on their instructors. The evidence for this assertion is found in replies to a pair of ques­tions concerning classroom procedure. The first dealt with how much initiative an instructor ought to take to make certain his class was grasping the material presented. It read:

Which of the following learning situations best suits your needs? 1. One where the instructor presents the material and you have a chance to raise a question if you don't get it the first time, but after that it is up to you to find some way of learning it.

2. One where the instructor who is asked a question takes pains to make sure that you really understand the answer before he moves on.

3. One where instructors feel out the class to make sure that students have really understood the material before going on.

The reader can readily see that proceeding from 1 to 3 the initi­ative is increasingly in the hands of the instructor. The second question read:

Which of the following learning situations best suits your needs?

1. One where the instructors give you a great many indications as to which parts of the material it is most important to learn.

2. One where the primary responsibility for selecting what is important is given to you, with the instructors available for guidance when needed.

I n addition to choosing the alternative they preferred in both cases, the interviewees were asked to say which alternative best described the actual situation at M.LT. By comparing their preferences with their descriptions of the actual situation, we

38 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

were able to classify answers according to whether M.I.T. was giving the freshmen more or less independence, or just about as much independence, as they wanted. Table 9 shows the results.

TABLE 9 STUDENTS' COMPARISONS OF M.LT. WITH THEIR OWN

PREFERENCES FOR INDEPENDENCE AND DEPENDENCE IN

THE CLASSROOM

M.I.T. gave student as much independence as he wanted M.I.T. gave student more independence than he wanted M.I.T. gave student less independence than he wanted M.LT. gave him more independence in one respect and less in another than he wanted

Total number

27% 61 6

6

100% (139)

We see that nearly two-thirds of the freshmen would have liked their instructors to give them more guide lines through the great quantities of material presented. Even more interesting than this finding is the fact that the attitudes expressed in May represented a retreat from a stand in favor of independence which freshmen took the summer before they entered M.LT. The second of the two questions quoted above was included in both the August and May questionnaires. Table 10 shows that the proportion of students favoring the independent and de­pendent alternatives was reversed in the course of the year.

TABLE 10 PREFERENCES FOR INDEPENDENCE OR DEPENDENCE

IN THE CLASSROOM: AUGUST, 1957, AND MAY, 1958

August, 1957 May, 1958

Those choosing Those choosing the independent the dependent alternative alternative 66% 34 3470 66

Total 100% 100%

Total number (139) (139)

These figures, however, only give us the net result of all the individual shifts that freshmen made. Table 11 breaks them down further to show what proportion of freshmen shifted in each direction and what proportion did not change their position.

TABLE 11 COMPARISON OF AUGUST AND MAY CHOICES OF INDE­PENDENT OR DEPENDENT ALTERNATIVE FOR INDIVIDUAL

FRESHMEN

Shifted from the independent to the dependent alternative Shifted from the dependent to the independent alternative Chose the independent alternative at both times Chose the dependent alternative at both times

Total number

44% 12 22 22

100% (139)

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 39

Apparently, then, high school seniors recruited to M.I.T. thought themselves able to handle a good deal of academic self­responsibility . Yet after a year of exposure to a difficult cur­riculum during which they actually were made largely re­sponsible for their own learning, a plurality had changed their minds to some extent.

There is some evidence, furthermore, that this change occurred in a class of freshmen who were unusually independent in comparison with some other freshmen engineers and scien­tists. The question we have been dealing with, identically worded, was put to the Class of '62 at another engineering school (College X) very early during their freshman year. Only 52 per cent of the 1,054 freshmen at College X chose the independent alternative, as compared with 66 per cent of enter­ing freshmen at M.LT. Part of the difference might be accounted for by the fact that the freshmen at College X had already been at college for a while when they were polled. However, only 13 per cent of them said they had changed their minds on this point since arriving at school. We have seen that 56 per cent of the M.LT. freshmen had changed by spring. It seems un­likely that all the changes of sentiment on this point occur early in the year. Rather, it is probable that the freshmen at College X were a less independent group to begin with. On another question measuring independence of attitude which was identi­cal with one of ours, only 24 per cent of College X freshmen, as compared with 35 per cent of M.LT. freshmen, felt that required courses should be kept to a minimum, leaving them free to take a great many electives.1

ATTITUDES TOWARD LIVING GROUPS

Students' replies to a series of six questions concerning their living groups are shown in Table 12.

To all but one of the questions a majority of the students gave favorable replies. Yet their attitudes were not as favorable as this fact might imply. The two most frequent "No" responses were significant: On the one hand, students were quite dissatis-

1 The figures quoted here are taken from an unpublished study by Dr. Nahum Medalia which he has kindly made available to us. Dr. Medalia's questionnaire included many questions identical with ours, making pos­sible illuminating comparisons. The social characteristics of the College X Class of '62 were quite similar to those of the M.I.T. Class of '61 except for a lower average educational level among the fathers of the College X freshmen. On many of the attitude questions the responses of the two classes were virtually identical. But there were some key exceptions which we shall mention.

40 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

TABLE 12 EVALUATIONS OF LIVING GROUPS

Per cent answering Total Yes No Total number

Is the place where you live physi-cally pleasant and attractive? 66% 34 100% (132) Is the service there adequate on the whole? 69% 31 100% (132) Is there a definite house spirit? 53% 47 100% (131) Does the house do enough about arranging social activities for the residents? 82% 18 100% (131) Is it easy to find someone to do things with whenever you want to? 86% 14 100% (132) Is it easy to get peace and quiet when you want it? 49% 51 100% (132)

fied with study conditions; on the other hand, they failed to find in dormitory life the college spirit which so many were looking for. Thus the dormitories met the needs neither of the students who wanted to work very hard nor of those who wanted to have a collegiate good time. The apparent contradiction between the complaint about lack of house spirit and the assertion by a large majority that the houses were doing enough to arrange social activities was not really a contradiction. As several students ex­plained, the house officers did what they could, but house activ­ities which they organized were poorly supported because "people don't have time":

Something should be done to get students to enter into things, not stay locked in their rooms. I don't know what can be done. They're wasting their best years.

Table 12 does not break down responses according to living units. When this is done, as in Table 13~ it becomes clear that a disproportionate number of the favorable responses came from fraternity men. Students who lived in fraternity houses, perhaps out of a spirit of loyalty, were heavily favorable to their houses in response to virtually every question; dormitory residents were very much less favorable. Furthermore, different dormi­tories varied little in rating. Though Baker House was consid­ered more pleasant and attractive physically than the others, the differences in the rating of dormitories were in no case statistically significant, whereas the difference between the dormitory ratings, taken collectively, and the fraternity ratings was statistically significant in every case.!

1 A "statistically significant" difference, for purposes of this report, means a difference which could have occurred through the chance errors of sampling no more than 5 tim~s in 100,

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 41

TABLE 13 EVALUATIONS OF SPECIFIC LIVING GROUPS

East Frater-Baker Burton Campus nities

Physically pleasant and attractive? Yes 92% 50% 41% 87% No 8 50 59 13

100% 100% 100% 100% Total number (12) (38) (27) (46) Service adequate on the whole?

Yes 50% 55% 41% 96% No 50 45 59 4

100% 100% 100% 100% Total number (12) (38) (27) (46) Definite house spirit?

Yes 8% 29~) 37% 93% No 92 71 63 7

100% 100% 100% 100% Total number (12) (38) (27) (46) House arrange enough social activity?

Yes 75% 78% 56% 98% No 25 22 44 2

100% 100~o 100% 100% Total number (12) (38) (27) (46) Easy to find someone to do things with?

Yes 92% 78 (;{) 78(/~) 98% No 8 22 22 2

100% 100% 100% 100% Total number (12) (38) (27) (46) Easy to get peace and quiet?

Yes 33% 39% 44% 65% No 67 61 56 35

100% 100% 100% 100% Total number* (12) (38) (27) (46)

* A few freshmen living at home or in the women's dormitory are omitted from Table 13.

Among dormitory residents the absence of house spirit was actually the most frequently made comment, whereas it was hardly mentioned by fraternity men. A somewhat smaller rna­j ority of all dormitory residents felt that it was difficult to get "peace and quiet" for study in their houses. Among the fra­ternity men only a minority said this, but the complaint was important nonetheless, because it differed so strikingly from the uniform favorableness of all their other replies. Poor study conditions were the fraternity man's only complaint about his house.

In the dormitories studying was difficult-especially for stu­dents in doubles, triples, and suites-because the students

42 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

studied, slept, and relaxed each on his own schedule. There were card games, "riots," water fights, bull sessions, and loud hi-fi sets to disturb students who were trying to work. And many, either because they were accustomed to rooms of their own and quiet study halls, or because they were unaccustomed to study altogether, were quite easily distracted:

My study conditions are rather poor. They made a triple out of three rooms and there's always someone walking in the room, playing the radio, or throwing a ball around. So if I really want to study I go to the library.

It's like an asylum all the time. Always something going on. I can't study with noise. Some people can. They have six-hour bull sessions.

I go to the library to study because I find that two to three hours of unin­terrupted studying is much better than, say, seven interrupted ... someone coming in and asking me a question-they interrupt my thought. I answer, the door bangs, and someone comes in to see my roommate.

The fraternities set up "study conditions" which seemed to vary a good deal in their effectiveness. In some houses they were effective only for a brief period at the beginning of the year, and in others they evidently worked well throughout the entire two semesters:

Study conditions exist from 7 p.m. overnight. Theoretically you can ask for quiet and get it. In some study rooms this is effective and in others you ask for quiet and don't get it. They're never as effective as they should be.

If you want study conditions it's your perfect right to have them on week nights ... all you have to do is say so. People going in and out of rooms might be the only disturbance, but then you'll have the same type of noise in the dorms. But I think you could say that study conditions are slightly better in a dorm because the rooms are separated off it seems like and we're all living in kind of a group ...

Sometimes it wasn't easy to ask for study conditions:

I was a pledge the first term. I didn't have too much to say. Sometimes it creates bad feelings if you ask for study conditions too much. The two guys in my room were difficult. They could study with noise.

This psychological situation was not confined to fraternities. At M.LT., as at other professional schools, students develop what might be called "output norms." They evolve standards concerning the amount of work which is permissible. Essentially, the standards consist of a floor and a ceiling on the amount of work, with considerable room for individual preference in be­tween. However, in most places the student who works too little or too much according to these standards incurs the very evident displeasure of his classmates. Actually, norms of this

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 43

kind are less strong at M.I.T. than they are at smaller schools, where the student who wants to go his own way cannot easily disappear into the anonymous crowd. Nevertheless, they are present. The floor on study hours was not operative in the dormitories but it was in the fraternities. No fraternity pledge could "goof off" beyond the accepted amount without reproof, particularly if his grades fell as a result. The ceiling was evident in both fraternities and dormitories, although it was enforced only mildly. The "Tech tool" who went too far might be shunned or razzed:

They don't like tools. They're likely to make it very hard for someone who does too much. He's considered odd, no fun, and unhappy, or he should be unhappy if he's normal. They razz and the fellow will go off in a corner and study where he won't be bothered.

The rationale of the output norm was made very clear by a few of the students:

People who study too much will raise the class average and make it harder for the rest of the class. Some who really study hard lock themselves in their room and don't associate with you. People like the person who's hitting class average ... he's not hurting you. There's too much com­petition because of the grading system based on the class average. You don't like people who pull up the average. People, however, who don't study much and still get good grades are O.K.

This, of course, is exactly like the rationale of the industrial worker who resents the fast fellow worker as a potential "rate buster." The assumption is that most M.LT. students have approximately the same talents and will perform about the same with equal amounts of work. The student whose grades go up because he works above the "ceiling" is a rate buster because he pulls up the class average and thereby forces others to work harder in order to remain at or above it. The student who re­ceives high grades in spite of himself, however-that is, in spite of not working harder than the norm, is admired for his genu­inely superior talent.

Occasionally the tools meet with active interference. One student said:

The hall is divided into two groups of freshmen. One group studies all the time; the other group, which I'm a member of, we just study if we need to. We like to do a lot of things. We try to get the others to participate. We put pressure on them not to study too much. Others come in. You have a bull session for a few hours. If they resist, you put a sign "sorehead" on the door-or something like that.

But then he added, "If somebody really wants to study, they can."

44 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

This last comment is true. There are places on campus where the student can escape from group pressure almost entirely and, left to himself in his single room, "tool" day and night. And there are cliques on campus whose members pride themselves on their uniformly high cums and who hardly feel that there is such a thing as too much studying-although they may believe that some play ought to be mixed with the hard work. We also uncovered one, perhaps short-lived clique, whose members had abdicated work completely and gathered in the poolroom for companionship during the long, empty hours when the others were attending classes.

M.LT. is a big place and not a very cohesive one. There is not just one "output norm" but several of them. The curricu­lum's pressures on the students to work to the outermost limit of their capacity seem stronger than the self-protective counter­pressures which the students are able to create. Nevertheless, 44 per cent of the freshmen reported that there was some senti­ment against "too much studying" where they lived.

Students' satisfaction with study conditions, classified by liv­ing group, is shown in Table 14.

TABLE 14 SATISFACTION WITH STUDY CONDITIONS BY LIVING GROUP

H OW do you feel about study conditions where you live?

Baker Burton East Campus F ra terni ties

Well satisfied 25% 34% 52% 54%

Only fairly well satisfied 50 42 33 35

Dissatisfied Total 25 100% 24 100% 15 100% 11 100%

Total number (12) (38) (27) (45)

The students in Baker and Burton Houses proved to be sig­nificantly less satisfied with study conditions than students in the fraternities or on East Campus. We already know from Table 13 that fraternity men could get "peace and quiet" more easily than dormitory residents. The difference in chances of getting peace and quiet reported by Baker, Burton, and East Campus men was not large. With respect to another element in the study situation, however, East Campus was distinctive. When students were asked whether there was any sentiment in their living groups against "too much studying," East Campus residents turned in by far the largest majority saying "no."

Thus it turns out that East Campus and the fraternity houses had relatively better study conditions than other living groups, but for different reasons. In the fraternities there were rules for enforcing conditions of quiet which had a considerable degree

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 45

of effectiveness; in East Campus there was little group senti­ment against "tooling."

TABLE 15 SENTIMENTS AGAINST "TOO MUCH STUDYING" BY LIVING GROUP

Is there any sentiment against too much studying where you live?

Baker Burton East Campus Fraternities

COLLEGE SPIRIT

Yes 25~ 420/0

22% 33~

Yes with Total qualifications No Total number 17 58 IOO~ (12) II 47 1000/0 (38) 4 74 IOO~ (27)

13 54 IOO~ (46)

As we showed in Table 13, lack of house spirit was mentioned by almost 75 per cent of the dormitory residents. This lack was probably stated as a fact rather than as a complaint by some students, an idea which is supported by the answers to another question. When asked whether or not M.LT. was an impersonal school and whether they themselves preferred a personal or im­personal college environment, 27 per cent of the freshmen said that M.LT. was indeed a very impersonal school and that they liked it that way.

However, the majority of freshmen wanted and expected col­lege to mean something in their lives beyond the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Despite their disappointment in some of the teaching and their criticisms of specific courses, grading, and the quiz system, the freshmen were largely satisfied with M.I.T. academically. But they wanted also to participate in a college community which would engage their loyalty and affec­tion. One student remarked, early in the year, "A school should be a place you love and want to contribute yourself to; I won't feel any tie to this place." and the following comments are typical:

It's the impersonality. Live or die and no one cares. Being here is like in New York City. There I feel like a nobody-same here. The attempts they make aren't successful, like Deans' luncheons are nothing. Orientation week is a flop. You meet all these people and never see them again. They should do more with the people in your section.

In high school I was somebody. Now I'm just one of 900. There I was well known and here I'm just an average student. I'm not considered as an individual any more. Instructors, through no fault of their own, don't know me. It's hard to get acquainted with them. It's mostly because I'm not outstanding in any way, neither smartest nor stupidest.

Many students had difficulty explaining just what they meant by a lack of school spirit. They talked all around the subject

46 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

and often as not ended by suggesting that the cure was a foot­ball team:

I think the school isn't living up to the spirit of college life. It's too mechanical, too industrial. There's not enough liberal school spirit. People tied together with a bond. Here the common bond seems to be that everyone hates the school. It's sort of me against the school. The reason they hate the school is workload and lack of integrated spirit. The latter is more important. Workload isn't really primary. It would help if they had a football team.

The football team symbolizes pleasant events and efforts, ex­perienced together, which would create ties among students and between students and the school. The lack of satisfying, positive ties to other people was mentioned again and again:

Every day like a laborer you do your work and then come back. Every· body's so involved with themselves and their own interests that they're not so friendly. It's hard to be friendly with anyone you're competing with so strongly.

They seem to leave out social activities. They don't require you to partici­pate. Here you can go a whole year without knowing the person next door to you. At other colleges, they have more parties and get-togethers with housemasters and faculty and students-and they go to them.

Some of these students felt that social events at the beginning of the year were badly planned. They should be arranged, they said, to help you get acquainted with the people in your section and in your dormitory whom you would be seeing every day­so that the initial contacts could grow into lasting relationships. Others felt that the workload left too little time or that the com­petitive atmosphere created too much hostility for friendship to flourish. Still others blamed the lack of school spirit on other students who, they claimed, were interested in nothing but studies and grades:

About half the students care only for grades and study constantly, and this results in their looking upon school spirit as silly. I don't feel that way.

There's apathy all around. No spirit. I don't know whether you can get it with the type of people here. They're more intellectual people-less interested in big spirit type activity. They don't participate in this sort of thing.

College spirit arises on campuses which are cohesive com­munities. A campus may be permeated by values which students absorb as they become absorbed into the community, or into subgroups within it. Bennington College in the late thirties was pervaded by aNew Deal liberalism which stemmed from the

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 47

faculty.1 Another group on a small campus in the forties was devoted to a "progressivism" which extended to art, philosophy, and personal relations as well as to politics; another was built around religious values which laid a very heavy emphasis on service to the community. When student-faculty contact is close and when the faculty has high prestige for the students, the values climate may stem in large part from the instructors.

When a college culture is well developed and when it differs from that of society at large, campus life itself may be the most influential educational experience the student undergoes. In the company of his peers he may experiment for four years with attitudes and values which were new to him as a freshman; and when he leaves, he may be a different person, not only in terms of knowledge but in terms of his approach to life.

On many campuses, however, nothing of the sort takes place.2

For a variety of reasons the student body is so atomized that a college community scarcely develops. This appears to be the case on the M.I.T. campus. Except in the fraternities, the M.I.T. freshmen went through their first year as competitive individuals or as members of a small group of friends. That they did not find any college community to belong to might have been due to their status as first-year men; but we suspect that such com­munities simply do not exist at M.I.T.

A similar situation prevails at many engineering schools. One study shows that even when an engineering curriculum is located on a campus where there is a strong student culture, the engineering students do not participate in it. One of the explana­tions offered points to the social origins of these students. Data from some national samples show that engineers are recruited from working-class and lower-middle-class families in larger numbers than most other undergraduates, and it has been in­ferred that youngsters from these backgrounds regard college primarily as a ladder of mobility. They are focused on acquir­ing the requisites for high occupational status and have little inclination for intellectual and emotional experimentation.3

1 Theodore M. Newcomb, Personality and Social Change (New York: Dryden Press, 1943).

2 According to Philip Jacob in his book, Changing Values in College (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), a lasting residue from a distinctive college culture is left by only a tiny minority of American colleges. This may be due to one of two causes: either there is no real college commu­nity, or the community has values identical with those of society at large.

3 This material is taken from an unpublished manuscript by Martin Trow of the Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of California at Berkeley.

48 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

A second factor, so obvious that its importance may be underestimated, is time. Engineering students probably put in a longer work week than undergraduates in liberal arts colleges of comparable quality.1 They have little leisure. Without leisure there cannot be much interchange among people. Without inter­change, there is no campus life and no student culture.

A third factor which is peculiar to the M.I.T. campus is spatial arrangements. If one's daily routine is such that one is brought repeatedly into contact with the same people-at home, in class, at meal time-the probability of group formation is greatly increased. Conditions at M.I.T. are rather unfavorable on this score. Sections are unrelated to living groups. Living groups are large and do not take their meals together. Some freshmen complained that social events were often meaningless because "they get you together with people you never see again."

FRIENDSHIP

The conditions of life at M.LT. thus do not promote the forma­tion of sizable communities. Students' informal relationships to one another bind them only into small cliques and isolated friendships. At the end of the year students were asked how many close friends they had at M.LT. (They were encouraged to define "close friend" in their own way.) Five per cent of the freshmen reported that they had no close friends; 19 per cent said they had one to three; 51 per cent had four to ten; and 25 per cent had more than ten. Fraternity men were more likely than dormitory residents to say they had "more than ten" close friends at M.LT. This sometimes meant they were giving lip service to a fraternity ideal in including the entire membership under that category-but even allowing for this conventional response, the difference was probably a real one.

The friendship patterns of the fraternities and dormitories showed another difference. Among dormitory residents, about half the students said that their close friends did not "go around together." These students, in other words, did not describe them­selves as members of an intimate peer group; their friendships were pair relationships only. The other half said that they and their close friends did travel together as a group. In the fraterni­ties, 70 per cent said their close friends were a group, and only

1 This situation may be changing, however. A study in progress at Amherst shows that Amherst freshmen study just as many hours per week as M.LT. freshmen.

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 49

30 per cent that they were separate. In all, by the end of the first year, 58 per cent of the freshmen had made themselves members of a small clique in which closeness and intimacy prevailed; 42 per cent had only isolated friendships.

Although there was little difference among living groups in the number of friends a student had, there were definite differ­ences relating to the type of room he lived in. Students in single rooms had decidedly fewer close friends than students in double rooms or suites.1 This finding appears to highlight the social effect of spatial arrangements. However, the finding needs to be qualified. Perhaps gregarious students were the ones who ap­plied for double rooms and suites, whereas those who preferred to limit their friendships applied for the singles. It is not pos­sible to test this hypothesis with any precision since freshmen did not always receive the kind of room they asked for. There was no correlation between the type of room a freshman lived in and the number of close friends he had before coming to M.LT. On the other hand, there was a small correlation between this number and the number of close friends he had at M.I.T. at the end of the year. And students who said, before coming, that it was "very important" to make friends at M.LT. also averaged a slightly larger number of close friends than those who said making friends at M.LT. was not very important. Neither of these relationships was as large as that between type of room and number of friends, however.

As in most social situations, attitude and objective circum­stances undoubtedly interact to determine how many friends a freshman makes. His wishes have a great deal to do with it; but the type of room he is in may facilitate or hinder the fulfillment of his wishes. Furthermore, closeness in space is especially im­portant for the formation of friendships when time is scarce. One need only listen to a freshman complain about the time he "wastes" walking from Burton to Walker Memorial for his meals to realize that time shortage makes distance an obstacle to social relationships.

TIME

Very little, in fact, can be understood about the life of an M.I.T. freshman without looking at his time schedule. He spends 24 hours a week in the classroom and an average of 32 hours weekly at his desk, making up altogether a 56-hour work week. Of course, many freshmen in 1957-58 spent more or less

1 See Tables A4 and AS, Appendix.

50 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

than the average amount of time doing homework and studying. Although the class averaged 63 hours a week for sleeping and eating, 26 per cent of them got along on less than 60 hours a week for these two activities, an allotment which indicates that one or another of them was being skimped.1 The remaining 49 hours of the "average freshman week" were left for everything else. And "everything else" included such myriad little things as writing letters home, taking care of one's laundry, and chatting with one's classmates as well as such bigger things as going to church and taking part in extracurricular activities.

Whether or not one considers this a heavily work-oriented life depends on what one compares it with. In the beginning the freshmen probably compared it with their immediate past. In high school they had averaged 14 hours a week on homework and 28 hours on recreational and social activities. At M.LT. this work-play ratio was literally turned upside down. Twice as much time went to homework as went to all extracurricular, social, and recreational activities combined.2

As we have already indicated, the freshmen were by no means prepared for this radical shift in the apportionment of their time. It was only after they arrived and became acquainted at first hand with the volume of material to be learned that they actually faced the necessity for much more work and less play than they were accustomed to. The discovery required a difficult adjustment. Not only did habits and patterns of living need to be reorganized-sometimes drastically-but in many cases an emotional adjustment had to be made as well. "Collegiate" good times were a part of their vision of M.LT., and when these hopes were dampened by heavy work schedules some freshmen became quite resentful:

I can't understand why you have to be a genius to get eight hours of sleep around here, which is about what it boils down to. I know of a few people that do get eight hours, but I haven't seen them out of their rooms . . . . I don't see how an individual can subsist this way. They claim they want you to be a whole man, and yet it's only by not going out that you get the work done-or by doing what I do, I still maintain I go out at least one night a week. But even that upsets my schedule.

1 Dr. Dana L. Farnsworth says in his book Mental Health in College and University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957) that in­adequate sleep was a problem he met with frequently as a psychiatrist at M.LT. 2 See Tables A6 and A7, Appendix.

AT THE END OF THE YEAR 51

The remarks of another student illustrate the changes in life organization which many freshmen-after experiencing some low grades----found they had to make:

As for grades I have two failures ... I think part of the reason for it is that I spread myself too thin. I took too many activities. I was in Tech Show, also worked a little bit on The Tech and my fraternity. I expected to spend more time on school work but-I was sort of enticed into this other. In other words, it was the way I lived before and I just kept on with it. [He then said that he had dropped some of his activities.] I've cut out a lot of wasted time. I used to go back to the house for lunch, but now I make my own-just so I don't spend the time walking across the bridge. Sometimes I'll stay over at school right through dinner at the house-I can come back at 10 and eat dinner then.

There was little margin for error or for waste of time in the freshman's week. And certainly there was no sense of leisure. Johnson's comment in Chapter 1 that he had no time to "prowl around" in mathematics was not atypical. Among the sample interviewed in May, 73 per cent said that they had found some things in their courses that they wished to pursue more deeply on their own. Only 32 per cent of these had actually done so; the others claimed they could not for lack of time.

Since shortage of time is such an acute problem for M.I.T. freshmen, it may be destructive to the educational aims of the school for many students to work during the school year.1 Unless the freshman is an excellent student, work cannot be fitted into his schedule without a sacrifice of study or recreation, or of both. Yet the Office of Student Personnel reports that at least 25 per cent of the freshmen were dependent on jobs held during the school year to help pay their way.

Time pressure also accounted for the failure of some fresh­men to take advantage of academic help available from upper­classmen. Such students said that it took so much time to ex­plain the problem to the upperclassman, and for him to work himself back to the point of solving it in freshman terms, that

it was not worth doing. It was wiser just to let it go as one of the many things you simply "didn't get." Practically, this im­plies that freshman tutors, to be efficient, should be sufficiently in touch with the freshman courses to know the problem mate­rial used at various points in the semester and the solutions that are within the freshman's scope.

1 This applies only, of course, to work which does not itself have educa· tional value.

52 THE FRESHMAN YEAR

Virtually all freshmen, then, worked longer hours at M.LT. and played shorter ones than they had in high school; and virtually all of them too, worked harder and played less than they had expected to. Still, the base line from which each indi­vidual adjusted his time schedule to the demands of M.LT. was his own high school time budget. Freshmen who had worked very little in high school made the biggest upward shift in their study time at M.LT.; yet at the end of the year they were still giving less time to study than freshmen who had worked hard in high school. And freshmen who had spent many hours on extracurricular and social life in high school made the biggest cuts in this portion of their lives but still ended the year giving as much or more time to play than students who had previously given little room to such activities.1

In other words, freshmen with high school backgrounds of "all play and no work" were forced to change their behavior markedly under the impact of M.LT. And even so, most of them were not able to revolutionize their habits sufficiently in the course of one year to match the studiousness of classmates who had established a pattern of hard work earlier.

Perhaps this explains why M.LT. freshmen were critical of their high schools for having demanded too little of them. Look­ing back at their secondary schools after a year at the Institute, 69 per cent felt that they had been "very well" or "fairly well" prepared for M.LT., and 31 per cent felt that they had been pre­pared "not too well" or "poorly." However, 58 per cent said that they had been "not too well" or "poorly" prepared in terms of their own study habits; and 73 per cent claimed that the demands which their high schools made on them had been "not high enough." This bears out Conant's contention that the most academically talented high school students are not working hard enough.2 Not only do they learn too little, but they also establish habits which have to undergo painful change when they enter an academically demanding college.

1 See Tables A8 and A9, Appendix.

2 James B. Conant, The American High School Today (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1959), p. 23.

PART TWO MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

CHAPTER 4 THE MEASUREMENT OF MORALE

-------------- ------

Against the broad background of student attitudes which we have presented we can now take up the question of morale. In order to study morale we had to define it in a way which would enable us to separate students with high and low morale through the use of interview data.

We constructed for the purpose two attitude scales labeled "Personal Esprit" and "Attitude toward M.I.T." The rationale for using two scales rather than one was this: A person may be happy but critical of his environment, or he may be unhappy but uncritical. Even though personal spirits and attitude to the environment usually rise and fall together, they are nevertheless logically distinct. Psychologically, a person beset with problems may blame the environment or himself, alternatively. And our qualitative materials, interviews and journals, convinced us that a freshman's attitudes toward M.LT. and his personal con­tentment were separate matters which did not always vary together.

The ideal procedure would have required us to pretest and standardize our scales on a sample of the freshman class before actually putting them to use. Since circumstances did not permit this we took an unavoidable risk, developing our scales from questions which had been found useful for the study of morale elsewhere. We were fortunate, since the scale questions proved

55

56 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

to have satisfactory consistency with one another when applied to the M.I.T. freshmen, and they also sorted freshmen into groups with clearly distinct patterns of response.

The scale of personal esprit included the following questions, scored as indicated:

Score

"On the whole would you say that at M.LT. you are" Very happy? 4 Fairly happy? 3 Not so happy? 2 Very unhappy? 1

"As compared with your high school days are you" Happier at M.I.T.? 3 About the same? 2 Less happy at M.LT. ? 1

"Please answer this question in terms of the way you've been feeling lately. Do the following things happen to you: often, sometimes, or never?" Getting clutched before or during exams: Often 1 Sometimes Never

2 3

Finding it almost impossible to get down to work or concentrate: Often 1 Sometimes 2 Never 3 Missing your folks or friends back home a lot: Often 1 Sometimes Never

2 3

"Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way your grades are going?" Satisfied 2 Dissatisfied 1

"Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the amount you're learning?" Satisfied 2 Dissatisfied 1

All the questions on this scale had satisfactory discriminative power (correlation with the total score) except the last. The student's satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the amount he was learning was unrelated to his other responses.1

The 52 students with scores of 18 through 22 were called the "high esprit" group; the 45 students with scores of 16 or 17

1 The technique used here for estimating the discriminative power of scale questions is described by William J. Goode and Paul K. Hatt in Methods in Social Research (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1952), Chapter 17, "Scaling Techniques: Ranking, Internal Consistency, and Scalogram Scales."

THE MEASUREMENT OF MORALE 57

were called the "medium esprit" group; and the 42 students with scores of 11 through 15 were called the "low esprit" group.

"Attitude toward M.I.T." was measured by the following questions, scored as indicated:

"In the light of your experience here, if you were applying for entrance to college all over again, would you want to come back to M.LT.?"

Yes Score: 3 No 1 Qualified answer 2

(a) "What are the things you like most about M.I.T.?" (b) "What are the things you like least about M.LT.?" Makes more favorable than unfavorable comments Score: 3 Makes more unfavorable than favorable comments 2

"Would you say in general that M.I.T. is: "Better than you expected?" Score: 3 "About as good as you expected?" 2 "Not as good as you expected?" 1

"Do you feel that M.I.T. is doing its best to look out for the welfare of its undergraduates?"

Yes Score: 2 No 1

"When you talk to outsiders do you feel proud to say you are an M.I.T. student?"

Yes, very proud Score: 3 Somewhat proud 2 Not especially proud 1

"Would you say that M.I.T. is a pretty impersonal place?" "Would you prefer a school that was more personal ?"* "Very impersonal; I would much prefer a personal school." Score: "Very impersonal; I don't care too much." 4 "Very impersonal; I prefer an impersonal place." 7 "Somewhat impersonal; I prefer a very personal place." 2 "Somewhat impersonal; I don't care too much." 5 "Somewhat impersonal; I like a fairly impersonal place." 7 "Not so impersonal; I would prefer a still more personal place" 3 "N ot so impersonal; I don't care too much." 6 "Not so impersonal; I like it the way it is." 7

* The scoring of this item assumed that agreement between the way the student perceived M.LT. and what he wanted from his environment was more favorable than disagreement between these two things. It also gave a slightly higher score to the "not so impersonal" response than to the response that M.LT. was impersonal.

58 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

All the items in this scale had satisfactory discriminative power excepting the one on being "proud to say you are an M.I.T. student when talking to outsiders." Most students an­swered "yes" to this, regardless of their other responses.

Once more dividing the students into three groups of ap­proximately equal size, scores 8 through 14, obtained by 42 students, were called "unfavorable" to M.I.T.; scores 15 through 18, obtained by 45 students, were called "medium" in attitude to M.I.T.; and scores 19 through 21, obtained by 52 students, were called "favorable" to M.LT.

It must be emphasized that the question "Was over-all morale among M.I.T. freshmen high or low?" cannot be answered from simple inspection of the scale scores. If we exchanged our ques­tions for some other equally reasonable ones, we would obtain a different distribution of responses. No matter how morale is measured, the results will be partly a function of the measuring instrument. For that reason the instrument is useful only in making comparisons among groups. We have used it in the fol­lowing chapters to make comparisons within the freshman class. Freshmen who scored high on the morale scales have been compared in many ways with those who scored low, in order to discern some of the causes and consequences of their different states of morale.

Only if our questions had been asked of two classes of fresh­men could we draw some conclusions concerning which class a~ a whole had the higher morale. We know of only one previous study of a college where a comparable attempt was made to measure morale. It was carried out from 1947 to 1950 at an eastern women's college of high prestige. Since three of the questions used there were appropriate for our purpose, we in­corporated them into our scales. A comparison of the responses of the two freshman classes to these questions is shown in Table 16.

These response patterns are rather startlingly similar, espe­cially considering that the two samples were of opposite sex and the studies separated by eight years. No final conclusion can be reached on this slim evidence; but such as it is, it offers no sup­port to the idea that M.LT. freshmen have either higher or lower morale than freshmen at other first-rate colleges.

The first question was answered almost identically by the M.I.T. freshmen and the women freshmen. The second question presents some difficulty because a rather large proportion of the women-9 per cent-gave no answer. Since the women were

THE MEASUREMENT OF MORALE 59

TABLE 16 FRESHMAN RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ON MORALE; COMPARISON WITH FRESHMEN IN AN EASTERN WOMEN'S COLLEGE

382 freshmen at an eastern 139 M.l.T. freshmen, May, 1958 women's college, 1950 On the whole would you say that here [at school] you are: Very happy? 24% Extremely happy? Fairly happy? 63 Fairly happy? Not so happy? 11 Not so happy? Very unhappy? 2 No answer

27% 60 10 3

100% 1000/0

As compared with your high school days are you: Happier? 39% Happier? 35% About the same? 30 About the same? 38 Less happy? 31 Less happy? 18

No answer 9 100%

100%

Would you choose this school again in light of your experience here? Yes 77% Yes 80% No 5 No 15 Qualified answer

("Uncertain," "Don't know" "maybe") 18 and no answer 5

100% 100%

responding to a paper-and-pencil questionnaire rather than a personal interview, we do not know what these "no answers" actually meant. Nevertheless, we see that a larger proportion of the men than the women said they were less happy in college than they had been in high school.

On the third question, just about identical proportions of the two freshman classes said that they would return to the college if they had it to do all over again. However, many more of the women than the men said flatly that they would not return. Al­though the interviewers at M.I.T. deliberately tried to force the freshmen to say "yes" or "no" in answer to this question, it proved impossible to get more than a few "no" responses. Freshmen insisted on qualifying their doubts about returning to M.LT.

A possible reason for these qualifications is suggested by considering the three questions together. Among the women, 10 per cent were "not so happy"; 18 per cent were less happy than they had been in high school; and 15 per cent said they would not choose the college again. There was probably a great deal of overlap in these responses; the women who said they were not happy very likely also said that they would not return.

At M.I.T., the case was different. Thirteen per cent were unhappy and 31 per cent were less happy than in high school,

60 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

but only 5 per cent were willing to say flatly that they wouldn't do it all over again. Apparently, happiness in college was a less important reason for staying there among M.I.T. freshmen than it was among the Ivy League women's group. The men evi­dently had other goals which college was serving and to which happiness was secondary.

We said at the beginning of this chapter that "Personal Esprit" and "Attitude toward M.LT." were logically and psycho­logically distinct. Table 17 shows that they were also empiri­cally distinct, although correlated, among the freshmen studied. While esprit in general went down as attitude became more un­favorable, there were students with high esprit and critical atti­tudes, and vice versa.

TABLE 17 PERSONAL ESPRIT AND ATTITUDE TOWARD M.LT.

Attitude Favorable Medium Unfavorable

Esprit: Number Per cent Number Percent Number Per cent High (23) 45 (16) 34 (3) 31 Medium (19) 35 (15) 34 (II) 26 Low (10) 20 (14) 32 (18) 43

Total (52) 100% (45) 100(/0 (42) 100%

The distinctness of personal esprit and attitude toward M.LT., as well as some of the ways they influenced each other, can be further illustrated from concrete instances.

Students who were happy and liked M.I.T. were perhaps sufficiently well illustrated by Smith and Green, our diarists of Chapter 1. Both had high grades. Smith had a full and satisfy­ing social life as well. Green had a very limited life outside of work, but his academic success kept him content.

Students who were unhappy and disliked M.LT. usually had low grades. One such student, who lived at a fraternity and spent thirty hours a week studying, was very critical of the teaching he received. He said he was unhappy all the time with a feeling of pressure and being "boxed in." He had trouble concentrating for long periods of time and volunteered that he wasn't getting enough sleep. His personal life seemed satisfac­tory, however. He liked the fraternity and traveled with a five­man clique, but he nonetheless wished that M.I.T. were a more personal place. He had enough recreation, he said, but still felt as though he "wanted to expand and couldn't." By this he meant that he wanted to do many new things but lacked time for them.

An example of a student who scored low on esprit but had a favorable attitude was a freshman who really did not like M.LT.

THE MEASUREMENT OF MORALE 61

so much as he esteemed it for the education it was giving him.! He said if it weren't for that, he would leave-zoom! His grades were high, but nothing else suited him. He wanted to get into a fraternity but didn't make it. He said he hated the campus, the climate, and the dormitory. He had no time for doing any of the things he liked. He was in no extracurricular activities. He lived to go home. When asked what he'd like to be doing at age 45 he said, "Anything that makes money. I live to play. Work is work." This young man is the son of an electrical contractor who lives in a small town on an income of under $5,000. He came to M.LT. to acquire the prerequisites for a big step up the occupational ladder, and he was prepared to "stick out" a life he intensely disliked for the sake of that goal. However, his bad mood was interfering with his capacity to work. His grades, though high, were going down. He was becoming depressed and unable to concentrate. He didn't blame M.LT. for any of these things, though. The courses and the teaching were "great." Essentially he placed the blame on himself for not having a good time. He was "too lazy to do things."

Students with high esprit and an unfavorable attitude toward M.LT. included several poor academic performers who blamed the Institute for their low grades. One was a student whose inter­view was somewhat contradictory. It looked as though he was actually quite unhappy but not prepared to admit it. He was struggling to "externalize" his discomfort, but without com­plete success. After stating that his grades often did not reflect what he really knew, he went on:

Lots of times I know what I'm doing but the marks don't indicate it. In 8.01 I knew enough to pass. Even though I flunked it, I knew more than some guys who passed it. 8.01 should not be part of the freshman curricu· lum. It is too frustrating and too difficult. Freshmen can get smashed up on this course.

Some other students with high esprit and critical attitudes, however, had high grades. Their criticism of M.I.T. contained no trace of sour grapes. One such student had every reason to be happy. His cum was 4.3, and he was mastering the material with ease. He said one of his happiest experiences during the freshman year was discovering that Montaigne's philosophy was the same as his own. He read some "extra" Montaigne to make

] One outcome of the study is that this distinction now strikes us as peculiarly important at M.I.T. If we were to measure attitudes toward M.I.T. again, we would measure esteem for the school and liking for it separately.

62 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

certain. He had many close friends, liked his dormitory, and had a clear occupational goal which was reinforced during the first year at school. He criticized M.I.T. for poor teaching, for excessive preoccupation with research, and for an absence of school spirit at the undergraduate level. His views were ex­pressed in a detached way. They did not seem to be freighted with affect deriving from personal disappointments.

Having made clear how we measured morale, and having pointed out that the measure has no meaning in an absolute sense but serves only to rank students in comparison with one another, we turn in the next two chapters to the causes of high and low ranking on these scales.

CHAPTER 5 ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS

M.LT. is a performance-oriented school. For freshmen per­formance meant grades, since no other measure of their learning was readily avaliable. Students also used other (and subtler) standards when they were judging each other's progress. How­ever, opportunity for instructors to make other kinds of judg­ments was quite limited.

Those students who had the most contact with the faculty­the low performers-were the most convinced that grades were "more important than anything else" in their instructors' evalu­ation of them. This was undoubtedly due to the fact that these students went to see their instructors to get help with their aca­demic work. The most frequent type of faculty-student contact outside the classroom centered around the students' academic problems. Students and instructors rarely encountered each other on other kinds of occasions.

Grades were the single most important factor affecting fresh­man morale. Tables 18 and 19 show that both personal esprit and attitude toward M.LT. declined steadily as academic per­formance declined. The sharpest break came at the low per­formance level; freshmen with cums of 2.9 or less were far more likely to be in low spirits and to have an unfavorable atti­tude toward M.LT. than their classmates.

63

64 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

TABLE 18 ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND PERSONAL ESPRIT

Academic Esprit performance High High (cum of 4.0-5.0) 51 % Medium-high (3.5-3.9) 47% Medium-low (3.0-3.4) 38% Low (1.0-2.9) 21%

Medium 30 31 38 37

Low 19 22 24 42

Total 100% 100% 100% 100%

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ATTITUDE TOWARD M.LT.

Total number (63) (36) (37) (48)

TABLE 19 Academic performance

Attitude Total

High Medium-high Medium-low Low

Favorable Medium Unfavorable Total number 45% 29 26 100% (66) 40% 40 20 100% (38) 34% 45 21 100% (38) 27% 29 44 100% ( 49)

Students planning to go into engineering or science differed slightly in the relationship between their grades and their morale. The future scientists had higher over-all morale be­cause they were more concentrated at the high performance levels. However, the sharpest break in morale for the future engineers came at the same point as for the class as a whole­that is, between the low performers and all others. For future scientists it came between the medium-high and medium-low performers. The would-be scientists apparently believed them­selves even more in need of high grades than did the would-be engineers. In this they were realistic, since to do significant work in science it is increasingly necessary to have a Ph.D. Undergraduate grades have a great deal to do with chances of admission to graduate school. For the freshmen, they prob­ably also constituted evidence concerning their capacity to do effective graduate work.

The importance of his academic performance in determining the freshman's outlook on many aspects of life at M.I.T. be­comes even clearer when we see that several attitudes which might appear to contribute independently to high or low morale were really the results of high or low academic performance.

For example, students who gave their instructors an over-all high rating had higher morale than students who rated them low. However, attitudes toward the instruction were also related to performance. High performers gave their instructors a good rating, and low performers rated them low. When attitudes toward the instruction and morale were studied for students at the same performance level, the correlation between the two disappeared. The way a student rated his instructors, then, obviously did not influence morale. Rather, this rating and morale weff~ both effects of the student's own performance.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS 65

Something similar was true of the relationship between in­terest in courses and morale. The two were positively corre­lated: the higher the interest, the higher the morale. This could be interpreted as a causal relationship, but the data show that it was not. High performers were more interested in their aca­demic work than low performers. Once performance was held constant, the correlation between interest and morale virtually disappeared; that is, high performers who were greatly inter­ested in their courses had no better morale than high performers who were less interested, and the same held true at the low performance level.

A new problem arises here, however. We must raise the question: Which comes first, high interest or good perform­ance? The story is like that of the chicken and the egg: the two produce each other in a continuing cycle. High interest tends to improve performance for obvious reasons. And good per­formance tends to sustain interest, if not to create it; while poor performance undermines it. The mutual effects of performance and interest were vividly described, the reader may recall, by one of our freshman journalists, who observed that after re­ceiving a poor grade in a subject, students were sometimes unable to study it for days; whereas after receiving a good grade, they were likely to return to the subject with pleasure and study it harder than ever.

Freshmen who said they had come to M.I.T. with good study habits had higher personal esprit and more favorable attitudes toward M.I.T. than those who said they came with poor ones. It is easy to trace out why this was so. We know that students who had studied long hours in high school performed better at M.I.T. than classmates of like ability! who had studied less. In our interim report we demonstrated this, using midyear grades as our measure of M.LT. performance.2 Table 20 shows that the relationship between hard work in high school and high grades at M.LT. still held at the end of the year.

The striking fact is that while hours of study in high school were related to performance in the freshman year, hours of study at M.I.T. itself were not.

How can we explain this seeming paradox? The reader will recall from Chapter 3 that freshmen who had studied little in high school drastically increased their study hours when they

1 As measured by M.I.T.'s scholastic index. 2 Sussmann and Levine, op. cit., p. 104.

66 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

TABLE 20 HOURS OF STUDY IN HIGH SCHOOL AND PERFORMANCE AT M.LT.

Hours per week of study in high school 0-14 15-20 21 and more

Total Total number

Performance at end of freshman year Medium· M edium-

High high low

33% 48% 48% 38 26 30 29 26 22

100O-~)

(63) 100% (35)

100% (37)

Low

60% 23 17

100% (48)

came to M.LT. While they did not quite overtake those who had always been studious, they narrowed the time gap consider­ably. Table 21 suggests, however, that they narrowed the gap less in terms of efficiency than time. Some of these students who

TABLE 21 HOURS OF STUDY AT M.LT. AND PERFORMANCE DURING FRESH·

MAN YEAR

Performance at end of freshman year Hours per week of study Medium· Medium· during freshman year High high low Low 0-24 21% 21% 19% 16% 25-39 59 55 55 56 40 or more 20 24 26 28

Total 100% 100(/0 100% 100% Total number (66) (37) (38) (50)

were new to long periods of homework put in the hours but probably did not use them well. Unaccustomed as they were to studying, they did not go about it effectively. As a conse­quence, their considerable effort did not bring commensurate results in grades, and morale went down. The causal chain is clear. Good study habits in secondary school led to good per­formance at M.LT.; this, in turn, led to good morale. Poor study habits in secondary school led to poor performance, in spite of major efforts to reform; and this led to poor morale. Putting in long hours of study at M.LT., if one was doing it for the first time in one's school career, did not make up for past deficiency-at least not during the freshman year.

ASPIRA TION LEVELS

Since performance was the most important determinant of freshman morale, it is necessary to look more closely at the students' reactions to their performance. How did midyear grades affect the freshman's future performance goals, and how did these goals in turn affect his morale? In order to determine the students' aspiration levels after midyears, we asked two questions: (1) "What kind of cum would you be satisfied

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS 67

with?" and (2) "About what cum do you expect to have at the end of this year?" In most of our analysis we used the first of these questions.

In defining a satisfactory cum, M.LT. students showed one of three tendencies: ( 1) they set their future goals very far above their midyear cums (one whole point or more); (2) they set them somewhat above their midyear cums (.4-.9 points more) ; or (3) they set them very close to their past perform­ance (within .3 points). We shall call the first group "extreme overaspirers"; the second, "moderate overaspirers"; the third, "constants." First we shall inquire what influences led some students to desire cums very close to, though higher than, their actual midyear grades, while others aspired to marks very much higher than they had received.

PERFORMANCE IN RELATION TO ASPIRATION LEVELS

Past studies1 report that the absolute level of academic per­formance determines how big a discrepancy there will be between the grades the student has received and the grades he aspires to. American students usually set their aspiration levels slightly above their past performance. However, low performers do not react according to this "normal" pattern. They use the level of aspiration in either of two ways: (1) they may set their future goals below their past performance; or (2) they may set them very high above their past performance. According to psycho­logical theory, the student who places his aspiration level below performance achieves an illusion of success when he then does better than he aspired to do. On the other hand, the student who aspires far above his past performance alleviates part of the pain of failure, since he never had a goal he really expected to reach; furthermore, he reaps some reward from being able to say that he is ambitious, from gaining social approval of his effort. In other words, according to the findings of past studies, low performance leads to both over aspiration and under­aspiration.

At M.LT., also, past performance was related to aspiration level. When the students were asked what cum they would be satisfied with, the responses formed a trimodal distribution with the modes at 3.5, 4.0, and 4.5. Almost everyone wished to be above the class average, even if only by a little, and 3.5 was just

1 See for example: Pauline S. Sears, "Levels of Aspiration in Academi­cally Successful and Unsuccessful Children," Journal 0/ Abnormal Social Psychology,35 (October, 1940), pp. 498-536.

68 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

above the average. Since a cum of 4.0 is needed to make the Dean's List, this was another favorite goal. As can be seen in Table 22, the low performers tended to set 3.5 as their goal; the medium-low performers and medium-high performers tended to choose 4.0 as their goal; and the high performers tended to choose 4.5. The higher a freshman's past performance, the higher the future goal he set for himself.

TABLE 22 PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATION LEVEL

M edium- M edium-Low low high Cum students would

be satisfied with performers performers performers High performers

at Under 3.5 3.5 3.6-3.9 4.0 4.1-4.4 4.5 Over 4.5

Total Total number

27 a/a

41 12 16

2

2

100% (49)

6% 4-9 4

20 22 41 48 6 9 3 13

15

100% (34)

100% (23)

-/0

33 9

49 9

100% (33)

However, performance not only influenced the absolute level of aspiration; it also determined how far above his actual cumu­lative average the student set his goals. Table 23 shows that at M.LT., as elsewhere, the low performers were the people most likely to be extreme overaspirers. Sixty-five per cent of low per­formers placed their aspiration levels far above their actual performance; 63 per cent of medium-low performers set their goals slightly higher than their performance; while 50 per cent of medium-high performers and 73 per cent of high performers aspired to a cum very close to that of their actual midyear performances.

TABLE 23 ASPIRATION PATTERN AND PERFORMANCE LEVEL

Performance level at midyear

High Medium-high Medium-low Low

15 34 63 33

~ I:: .t:l '" I:: <::>

\..)

73 50 10 2

~ <::>

E-...

100% 100% 100% 100%

.... 'l.l

-..0 .t:l E::

~~ (66) (38) (38) (49)

It might be supposed that such a finding is merely an artifact of the so-called "ceiling effect." Students whose grades were high had less room to aspire still higher than students whose grades were low, since the top cum possible to achieve is 5.0. The aspiration levels of high performers, therefore, were neces-

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS 69

sarily fairly close to their actual grades. However, when the grades aspired to were recalculated in terms of the proportion of "aspiration space" available to him that the student actually used in setting his future goals, it was found that high perform­ers used less of the "space" remaining to them than low per­formers did. There was a psychological effect here in addition to a ceiling effect. High performers were satisfied with their grades and did not need to set their future goals much above them. Low performers were dissatisfied and set their future goals at a level they were unlikely to reach.

In one respect, the behavior of M.LT. students was strikingly different from that of subjects previously studied. There were almost no underaspirers at M.LT.-and the few who did turn up were high performers who set their goals slightly under the midyear grades they had actually achieved.

This difference may be partly due to differences in research design. In other studies, subjects were asked to set aspiration levels for their performance in a series of individual tasks. The experimenter wanted to know how well the subj ect thought he would do in his next school test, next special test, or next attempt at an experimental task. Perhaps college students only use underaspiration in relation to individual tasks, not in rela­tion to their over-all grade average. Or perhaps under aspiration is more likely to show up in laboratory situations than in the real-life situation we investigated.

Another possibility is that M.LT. recruits a freshman popu­lation predisposed to high aspirations. We have some evidence that this is indeed the case. Both in our mail questionnaire and in the questionnaire administered early in the year at College X, freshmen were asked where they would be satisfied to rank in their class and where they expected to rank. The M.LT. Class of '61 had higher rank aspirations than freshmen at College X. Furthermore, the expectations of the entering freshmen at M.LT. were very close to their aspirations, whereas at College X expectations were a good bit lower than aspirations.

However, the comparison in Table 24 does not show that M.I.T. freshmen were predisposed to overaspiration. Rather, as high school seniors accustomed to ranking high in their classes, they were manifesting "normal" aspiration behavior by setting their future goals at a level equal to or a little higher than their past performance. Their aspirations were higher than those of College X freshmen because their high school records were on the average somewhat better.

70 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

TABLE 24 RANK ASPIRATIONS AND EXPECTATIONS OF FRESHMEN

AT M.LT. AND AT COLLEGE X

Where would be satisfied to rank

Pretty close to top In the top 10% In the top 20% In the top half Lower

Total Total number

M.l.T. College X 12% 6% 19 13 33 34 35 45 1 2

100% 100(;;) (804) (054)

Where expect to rank M.l.T. College X

9% 1% 16 6 30 21 41 62 4 10

100% 100% (794) (054)

A third factor in the absence of underaspiration among In­stitute freshmen is that M.LT.'s atmosphere makes underaspira­tion an almost untenable form of behavior. The norm of aiming high is very strong among both students and faculty . For a low performer to say that he would be satisfied with a cum lower than he had received would subject him to social disapproval. Underaspiration is effective only when the importance of the task to be performed can somehow be minimized; but it is ex­tremely difficult for M.LT. students to minimize the importance of doing well in their studies.

When asked what end-of-the-year cums they "expected," only 8 per cent of the low performers said they "expected" a cum one or more points higher than their midyear cums. This datum contrasts with the 65 per cent of low performers who said they would be "satisfied" with cums one point higher than they had received. In other words, low performers and medium-low per­formers expected to achieve considerably less than they aspired to. Among the high performers, 'on the other hand, the students expected to achieve almost what they aspired to. In addition, the majority of high, medium-high, and even medium-low per­formers were fairly realistic in the grades they "expected"; they expected their end-of-the-year cums to be the same as their mid­year cums.1 The very low performers, however, were not so realistic. Though they expected much lower grades than they aspired to, the majority still expected their grades to go up at the end of the year. The norm of high performance is so strong at M.I.T. that most poor performers apparently could not allow themselves to expect anything else.

The other index of aspirations mentioned above was the stu­dents' hopes for rank in their class. As we have shown, before coming to M.LT. about 60 per cent of the students hoped to fill

1 Eighty-five per cent of the sample did receive an end-of-the-year cum within .3 points of their midyear cum.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS 71

the top 20 per cent of the ranks in the class. After midyears, although the students had seen their actual grades, there were still many more aiming for the top ranks in the class than there was room for. Actually, the distribution of rank aspirations changed little.

TABLE 25 PERFORMANCE LEVEL AND DISCREPANCY BETWEEN EXPECTED END-

OF-YEAR CUM AND ACTUAL MIDYEAR CUM

* :;.... :;.... :;.... I.) I.) I.)

~ CI.l ~ ~

CI.l .:

~~g, ~~g, ;:::. ~ .... ~

.... I:l.. CI.l CI.l .... CI.l CI.l .... CI.l ..... CI.l

~ -...0 Performance t;.~ b ~.-:: t; ~ ~ ....

~ i:: ;:: ~I.) 0 ~ ~~ c ~ ~ c ~~ C :::l level ~ c·" I:l..~ \..:l e-.. e-.. .:

High 1% 3 76 20 100% (66) Medium-high 3% II 78 8 100% (37) Medium-low 16% 79 5 100% (38) Low 8% 51 39 2 100% (49)

* All but one of these had moderate negative discrepancies. One of the high performers had an extreme negative discrepancy.

We are particularly concerned with what happened to those students who entered M.LT. hoping to rank high in the class and then found themselves ranking low. Did their aspiration levels show a pattern different from that of poor performers who initially had not hoped for such high rank? As Table 26 reveals, low performers who initially aimed to be in the top 10 per cent of the class were more likely to become extreme over· aspirers after midyears than those who initially aimed lower. Those low performers who had had great hopes for personal distinction at M.LT. were not very easily able to lower their goals to conform to reality.

TABLE 26 PRE-M.l.T. ASPIRATIONS AND ASPIRATIONS AFTER MIDYEAR

GRADES OF LOW AND MEDIUM-LOW PERFORMERS

Where satisfied to rank at M.l.T. before coming Aspiration pattern Close after midyears to top Top 10% Top 20% Top half Lower Extreme overaspirers 78% 64% 36% 44% Moderate overaspirers II 36 64 49 Constant II 7

Total 100% 100% 100% 100% Total number (9) (II) (22) (43)

In summary, it is clear that the student's performance was very important in determining the way in which he set his aspiration level. In a situation where excellent performance is the chief value, low performers conformed to the norm by hold· ing high aspirations. Although low performers did not expect to reach their goals, they did expect a greater improvement in

72 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

their grades than any other group of students; their expecta­tions as well as their aspirations were more unrealistic than those of other freshmen. Furthermore, their aspiration levels were rigid in the face of a reality which seemed to demand a change. Freshmen who hoped to rank at or near the top of their class before coming to M.I.T. and who then found them­selves with low grades at midyears nevertheless continued to maintain high aspirations.

PERCEPTION OF RANK

Did low-performing students protect themselves from noncon­formity and the pain of failure through any other mechanism than high aspirations? There is evidence that misperception functioned as a protection for some students. We asked the freshmen where they thought they ranked in the class; "very near the top; in the top 10 per cent; top 20 per cent; top half or lower?" Two factors might contribute to incorrect percep­tion of one's rank. First, students ranking somewhere in the middle might more easily make a mistake than those at the extremes, since their rank is actually more ambiguous. And second, students ranking low might be motivated to misper­ceive their ranks. As Table 27 reveals, these two factors worked together to produce a striking result: 70 per cent of the extreme high- and low-performing students perceived their ranks cor­rectly. Among the medium-high performers for whom reality was somewhat ambiguous, 70 per cent also perceived the flat­tering truth; but among the medium-low performers, ambiguity plus the wish which is father to the thought made 60 per cent overestimate their rank. Motivation also explains the fact that among the 30 per cent of high performers who were in error concerning their rank, half over- and half under-estimated it; but among the low performers who were in error, it was always an error of overestimate.

TABLE 27 PERCEPTION OF RANK IN CLASS AND PERFORMANCE

Correctness of perception Over- Under- Total

Performance Correct estimate estimate Total number High performers 70% 17 13 100% (66) Medium-high 70% 30 100% (37) Medium-low 40% 60 100% (38) Low performers 71% 29 100% (49)

If the student overestimated his rank in the class, was he less likely to become an extreme overaspirer? In other words,

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS 73

did misperception substitute for over aspiration in some cases? Our data indicate that it did not. Neither within the medium-low performance group nor within the low performance group were there any significant differences in aspiration patterning be­tween those who perceived their ranks correctly and those who overestimated them.

LIVING GROUPS AND ASPIRATION LEVELS

Besides his own performance, another factor which affected aspiration levels was where the student lived. Before discussing this, we must note that there were fewer high performers in the fraternities than in the dormitories.

TABLE 28 PERFORMANCE AND LIVING GROUPS

Living group Performance Dormitories Fraternities High and medium-high 59% 42% Low and medium-low 41 58

Total Total number

100% (ll3)

100% (55)

The relationship between performance and aspiration pattern was also different in the two major living groups. Low per­formers showed no statistically significant difference in aspira­tion pattern, whether they lived in fraternities or dormitories. High performers, however, were significantly less likely to aspire above their actual performance if they were living in the fraternities.

TABLE 29A LIVING GROUPS AND ASPIRATION PATTERNS

OF HIGH AND MEDIUM-HIGH PERFORMERS

Aspiration patterns Extreme overaspirer Moderate overaspirer Constant Moderate underaspirer

Total Total number

Living group Dormitories 12% 24 58 6

Fraternities

470 4

88 4

TABLE 29B LIVING GROUPS AND ASPIRHION PATTER],:S OF LOW AND MEDIUM-LOW PERFORMERS

Aspiration patterns Extreme overaspirer Moderate overaspirer Constant

Total Total number

Living group Dormitories 39% 52 9

1000;;, (46)

F raterni ties 53C;{) 47

100% (32)

74 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

The tight-knit fraternity was better able than the loose-knit dormitory to enforce a ceiling on aspirations. For high per­formers to express dissatisfaction with their grades and aspire to still higher ones is in bad taste among students at M.LT., as elsewhere. To quote one freshman, "When a guy gets 90 on a quiz and bitches because he didn't get 95, he's not very popular with the ones who got maybe 50."

The fraternities, as we showed in our interim report, selected their members in terms of a system of values which we labeled "sociability." They emphasized that there are other things in life besides high grades and that once high grades are attained it would be undesirable to "tool" for ever better ones to the neglect of the sociable life. The force of the fraternity's values for its members is shown in Tables 28 and 29. The lower pro­portion of high performers in the fraternities probably had less to do with native ability among fraternity men than with the fraternity's system of values. And the failure of high performers in fraternities to overaspire as much as those in dormitories shows the careful avoidance by the fraternity man of the tabooed "Tech tool" behavior.

ASPIRATION PATTERNS AND MORALE

Up to this point we have been considering factors which influ­enced the setting of aspiration levels. Now we investigate the way in which aspiration patterns were related to morale. First let us look at the relation between aspiration pattern and atti­tude toward M.LT. The higher above his actual performance a student set his aspirations, the less favorable was his attitude toward M.LT.

TABLE 30 ATTITUDE TOWARD M.I.T. AND ASPIRATION PATTERN

Aspiration pattern Extreme overaspirers Moderate overaspirers Constants

Attitude toward M.l.T.

Favorable 31% 31% 48%

Medium 14 50 30

Unfavor­able 55 19 22

Total 100% 100% 100%

Total number (44) (48) (46)

If we separate the freshmen by performance, we find that the tendency for overaspiration to be correlated with unfavorable attitudes toward M.LT. held only among the low performers. Extreme overaspirers among low performers were significantly more unfavorable to M.LT. than moderate overaspirers. There were no significant differences in attitude toward the Institute among overaspirers and constants who were high performers.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS 75

This finding suggests that having an unfavorable attitude toward M.LT. was a defense mechanism. By placing the blame for his failure on the school, the student perhaps sought to escape a loss of self-esteem. If this defense were very effective, however, we would expect to find little or no relation between aspiration patterns and personal esprit. As Table 31 shows, there was a relationship. Overaspirers had lower personal esprit than did constants.

TABLE 31 PERSONAL ESPRIT AND ASPIRATION PATTERNS

Personal esprit Total Aspiration pattern High Medium Low Total number Extreme overaspirers 23% 40 37 100% (43) Moderate overaspirers 31% 31 38 100% (48) Constants 58% 27 15 100% (45)

If we now try to discover whether overaspiration contributed to low esprit over and above what was contributed by low per­formance, our results in Tables 32A and 32B suggest that it did; but the number of cases was small and the differences shown are not statistically !Significant.

TABLE 32A PERSONAL ESPRIT AND ASPIRATION PATTERNS OF HIGH AND

MEDIUM-HIGH PERFORMERS

Aspiration patterns

Extreme Moderate Moderate over- over- Constants under-aspirers aspirers aspirers Total

Personal '" ~ '" ~ '" ~ '" ~ '" ~ esprit ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ;j ;j ... ;j

~ ;j

~ ;j

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

High ( 2) 22% (10) 50% (36) 55% (-) (48) 49% Medium ( 4) 45 ( 5) 25 (19) 30 ( 2) 50% (30) 31 Low ( 3) 33 ( 5) 25 (10) 15 ( 2) 50 (20) 20

-- --- --- -- ----Total ( 9) 100% (20) 100% (65) 100% ( 4) 100% (98) 1000/0

TABLE 32B PERSONAL ESPRIT AND ASPIRATION PATTERNS OF LOW AND

MEDIUM-LOW PERFORMERS

Personal esprit High Medium Low

Total

Aspiration patterns Extreme Moderate overaspirers Number Per cent (0) 24 (7) 42 (4) 34

(41) 100%

overaspirers Number Per cent (2) 29 OS) 37 (4) 34

(41) 100%

Constants Number Per cent (3) 75 (-) ( 1 ) 25

( 4 ) 100%

There were so few cases of extreme overaspiration among high performers and so few cases of "constant" aspirations among low performers that we are not able to isolate clearly any negative consequences which overaspiration may have had for morale. We have shown, however, that overaspiration does

76 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

not save students who make low grades from being in low spirits. It definitely has no positive consequences for morale. Perhaps, as some psychologists claim, it is instituted as a mechanism to protect the student against a loss of self-esteem; but since it does not protect him against feelings of personal un­happiness, anxiety, and apathy, we infer that it fails of this end.

ASPIRATION PATTERNS AND PERFORMANCE

Having shown something of how aspiration levels were related to morale, we can now raise another important question: How were they related to performance? Up to this point we have studied how freshmen set their aspiration levels before enter­ing M.I.T. and reset them when they had seen their midyear grades. We shall now examine the relation between midyear aspiration levels and end-of-the-year performance. The reader will note that we are examining relationships in a time sequence: past performance affects present aspiration levels. Now we ask whether present aspiration levels affect future performance.

Perhaps overaspiration had no effect or a slightly negative effect on morale, but a positive effect on performance. Possibly the student who set his goals high above his past performance actually worked hard to achieve those goals and thereby raised his future performance. To study this question we need a special measure of performance. We already know that low per­formers were overaspirers. Here, however, we shall define per­formance in terms of the comparison between the student's actual grades at the end of the year and the grades predicted for him by M.I.T.'s scholastic index. Those students whose end­of-the-year cumulative ratings were one whole point higher than was predicted by their scholastic indices will be called "extreme overachievers"; if the grades were .4 to .9 cum points higher than was predicted, they will be called "moderate overachiev­ers"; if their grades were within .3 points of the prediction, they will be called "constants." Using the same cut-off points, those whose cums were lower than predicted are either "moderate underachievers" or "extreme underachievers." We can now examine the relationship between midyear aspiration patterns and end-of-the-year performance measured this way.

Overaspiration was correlated with underachievement. Ex­treme overaspirers at midyears were the students most likely to receive final grades under what the scholastic index had pre­dicted for them. "Constant" aspirers, conversely, were the most likely to achieve final grades which were higher than predicted.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS

TABLE 33 ASPIRATION AND ACHIEVEMENT

Achievement pattern

Aspiration pattern Extreme over-aspirers 2% 9 Moderate over-aspirers 2% 20 Constants 22% 40

37

54 29

40

20 9

12

4

100%

100% 100%

77

(43)

(46) (45)

We must take care not to interpret this finding as meaning that over aspiration caused underachievement. Rather, we are dealing with a situation in which low grades at midyears already represented underachievement for many freshmen. These low grades were followed by over aspiration and then by final grades very much the same as those at midyears. We are justified only in saying that overaspiration did not serve as a corrective for underachievement. Whatever caused performance to fall below that which was predicted, a level of aspiration far above per­formance did not help to bring it up.

Why didn't it? It is interesting to note that there were no differences among over-, under-, and constant achievers or be­tween over- and constant aspirers in the number of study hours per week at M.I.T. However, the underachievers were concen­trated at the low performance level. This is also where the freshmen who were light studiers in high school were concen­trated. We have already suggested that despite great effort on their part, freshmen who brought poor study habits to M.LT. were unable to overcome this handicap in the course of one year. The vicious cycle of long but inefficient study leading to low grades and low morale, which in turn reduced efficiency in study, probably accounts for their failure to fulfill their promise.

Thus, if over aspiration is indeed instituted as an ego de­fense, we must label it an "ego defense which failed"-at least among M.I. T. freshmen. It did not improve their performance. It went along with critical attitudes toward M.I.T., but this "proj ection of blame" onto the school proved in no way incom­patible with an "internalization of blame." Most of the low­performing freshmen "blamed" the school and themselves simultaneously; they were critical of M.LT. and they were in low personal spirits as well.

In fact, the interpretation of overaspiration as an ego defense is by itself incomplete. The aspirational behavior of M.LT.

78 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

freshmen must be understood in relation to its social setting. We are not dealing with a laboratory situation, where individuals are comparing themselves only with their own past perform­ances, but with a school, where students compare themselves with each other.

The distribution of academic aspirations at M.LT. looks very much like the model of aspirations for success which Merton has drawn for American society.1

Roughly speaking, in any social system where the goal of success is heavily valued and where there is an ideology that anyone can "get to the top," there are two forces which deter­mine aspirations for achievement: the ideology and reality. If reality is such that some people really do move upward, but at the same time chances for achieving the top success goal are dis­tributed with systematic inequality, then levels of aspiration conform to the pattern we have seen at M.LT. That is, the range of aspiration levels is far narrower than the range of real posi­tions in the system; and narrower, too, than the range of expec­tations. Aspirations cluster somewhere above the midpoint. (As we saw, virtually all freshmen wanted to be in the top half of the class.) At the same time, aspirations are lower for those who start from a point low in the system than for those who start higher up. (In our case, this is shown in the trimodal distribution of aspirations for cums, with the low performers aspiring for 3.5, the medium performers for 4.0, and the high performers for 4.5.) An important consequence is that the gap between aspira­tions and performance (achievement) is far greater for those low in the system than for those high up in it. (At M.I.T. overaspiration is concentrated among students with low grades.) These appear to be generalized structural characteristics of strati­fied, mobile social systems with homogeneous cultural goals. 2

1 See Robert K. Merton's classic essay on "Social Structure and Anomie." in Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press. 1957) .

2 They are also illustrated, for instance, in a study of the occupational aspirations and expectations of 1,000 ninth graders in New Jersey. Aspira­tions clustered above the midpoint of the occupational prestige scale and showed a remarkably narrow range. Expectations were considerably more realistic-that is, closer to the actual distribution of occupations in society. And the gap between aspirations and expectations was far bigger among ninth graders with fathers in low-status occupations than among those with high-status fathers. One may predict with reasonable certainty that the same would turn out to be true of the gap between occupational aspirations and occupational achievement for the youngsters themselves. See Richard M. Stephenson, "Mobility Orientation and Stratification of 1,000 Ninth Graders," American Sociological Review, 22 (April. 1957). pp. 204-212.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS 79

The gap between aspiration and achievement at the lower levels of such a system may cause what sociologists call "devi­ant behavior." This includes using illicit means to achieve the success goal (for students, an example would be cheating); developing symptoms of mental illness (for students, low morale); and abandoning the goal (for students, apathy or withdrawal from school).

Students of American society who believe the model we have described is a fair approximation to reality have suggested at least three alternative solutions to the problem of deviant behavior: ( 1) the success goal could be de-emphasized by the culture; (2) equality of access to it could be increased; (3) persons with relatively low access to it could be discouraged from adopting it as a goal. It is interesting to translate these ideas into possible reforms to eliminate low morale at M.I.T.

Point (1) suggests that grades be de-emphasized. This entails emphasizing other criteria for evaluating people. To some ex­tent this is precisely what happens in the fraternities. Unfortu­nately for the suggestion, the freshmen living in fraternities had no better morale than those in the dorms.1 That, however, might be due to the fact that the performance orientation of M.LT. permeates the fraternities too, despite their sociability values. Certainly low performance is as negatively valued in the fra­ternities as elsewhere at the Institute, although high performance is not as exclusively valued.

Another realistic difficulty such a suggestion runs up against is the time shortage which was discussed in Chapter 3. Values arise out of activities, and M.I.T. freshmen have little time for any but academic activities. Facilities for the pursuit of almost every conceivable interest are available; what is lacking is the possibility of investing enough time in them so that they even begin to compete in importance with academic work. Whether this is good or bad, it is the crux of the matter.

Point (2) suggests that equality of opportunity to attain high grades be increased. Concretely, this means helping those stu­dents who are handicapped by ineffective study habits to over­come this disadvantage as rapidly as possible. The acquisition of study skills need not be left to individual trial and error. Such skills can be taught. Basically, of course, it is the high schools which must be encouraged to teach them more effec­tively than they are now doing.

1 See Chapter 6.

80 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

However, the equalization of opportunity as applied to M.LT. has, of course, an inherent limitation. All populations include individuals with different degrees of talent. So long as students are graded relative to each other, in hierarchical order, the hierarchy will have a top, middle, and bottom, and the phe­nomena we have described will persist.

One may question whether such a grading system is necessary or desirable. Its two most important characteristics are the normal curve distribution of grades and the large number of ranks. Not all professional schools grade in this way. Some simply inform the students of whether or not their work is satisfactory-thus reducing the system to two ranks. Further­more, the decision of satisfactory or unsatisfactory is made rela­tive to an absolute standard of performance determined in advance-so that the distribution of students need not form a normal curve. They might all be considered satisfactory or all unsatisfactory.

Of course, the curve and the large number of ranks con­tribute greatly to the comfort of faculties when selective de­cisions must be made; they supply an "objective" criterion for the decisions. This is particularly necessary when faculties do not know their students well enough so that other criteria can play much part in selection.

However, it may be that beyond a certain point the refine­ment of a grading system ceases to make sense. And certainly faculties have the responsibility of deciding what absolute standards of performance shall be considered satisfactory, re­gardless of the quality of a particular student population. This is the ideology with which faculties resist the demand that they grade poorly prepared student populations on a curve, so as not to flunk too many. It might be considered whether it is not equally wrong to raise the ante indefinitely in the face of student populations of rising caliber.

Point (3) suggests that students with enough ability to gradu­ate from M.I.T. but not enough talent to make high grades be discouraged from aiming for them. However, it is doubtful that an academic community can promote high ambitions for some students and low ambitions for others. And there are dangers involved. Many people would not presume to discourage high ambition in freshmen who have low grades. There might be "sleepers" among them whose future attainments will belie the predictive validity of the examination system. Furthermore, aspiration levels probably cannot be influenced directly-that

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND ASPIRATIONS 81

is, by persuasion or exhortation. They can only be changed by changing the social situation which gives rise to them-and this leads back to points (1) and (2).

Finally, many people will consider that none of these solu­tions is worth its possible costs and that such low morale as exists among M.I.T. freshmen is not too high a price to pay for what M.LT. is now accomplishing.

CHAPTER 6 PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND VALUES

Although M.LT. is a performance-oriented school, it is also a place where students eat, sleep, play, and communicate with their fellows. In this chapter, we examine how some of these other aspects of daily life were related to freshman morale.

LIVING GROUPS

Common sense suggests that students' contentment with their living groups should affect their morale. In Chapter 3, we showed how freshmen rated their living groups on several cri­teria. Nearly all these ratings, taken separately, were slightly correlated with morale. For example, whether or not the student felt there was a "house spirit" where he lived was correlated with the favorableness of his attitude to M.LT., although not with his personal esprit. Whether or not he felt his residence was physically pleasant and attractive was correlated to a low degree with both. The strongest relationship of all was that between the student's feelings about study conditions in his living group and his personal esprit. Those students who were satisfied with their study conditions had considerably higher esprit than those who were dissatisfied. Once again, it was the condition most obviously related to performance which counted most for the M.LT. freshmen.

82

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND VALUES 83

TABLE 34 STUDY CONDITIONS AND MORALE

Per$onal esprit High

Students' attitudes toward their study conditions Well satisfied Fairly well satisfied Dissatisfied 48% 40% 12%

Medium 28 31 44 Low 24 29 44

Total 10OC~ Total number (58)0

100% (48)

100% (25)

Was dissatisfaction with study conditions a cause or an effect of low esprit? Considering the relationship between morale and performance, one might suppose that students with low grades and, in consequence, low esprit tended to blame study condi­tions. However, Table 35 shows that low performers were no more dissatisfied with study conditions than were other students.

TABLE 35 STUDY CONDITIONS AND PERFORMANCE

A ttitude toward study conditions Performance Well Fairly well Dis- Total level satisfied satisfied satisfied Total number High 32% 49 19 100% (60) Medium-high 55% 39 6 100% (36) Medium-low 27% 53 20 100% (34) Low 49% 34 17 100% (47)

If contentment with one's living group had been the sole determinant of morale, it would follow that the living groups which received the highest ratings from their residents-the fraternities-would also have had the highest collective morale. However, other factors in high morale-for example, high per­formance-were found less often in the fraternities than else­where. Whatever the interplay of forces involved, the morale of freshmen in Baker, Burton, East Campus, and the fraternities balanced out to be about the same. Despite the different char­acter of these living groups, neither the personal esprit of the freshmen nor their attitudes toward M.I.T. showed any statis­tically significant differences.

TABLE 36 LIVING GROUPS AND PERSONAL ESPRIT

Esprit Living Groups High Medium Low Total Total number Baker 42(10 50 8 100% (2) Burton 40% 26 34 100% (38) East Campus 30% 26 44 100% (27) Fraternities 35% 37 28 100% (46)

TABLE 37 LIVING GROUPS AND ATTITUDES TOWARD M.I.T.

Attitudes Unfavor- Total

Living groups Favorable Medium able Total number Baker 250/0 50 25 100% (2) Burton 42% 29 29 100% (38) East Campus 38% 30 32 100% (27) Fraternities 34% 33 33 100% (45)

84 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

FRIENDSHIP

The number of close friends a freshman had made by the end of his first year at M.LT. was positively correlated with his per­sonal esprit though not with his attitude toward the Institute. However, freshmen in single rooms and freshmen in doubles or suites behaved differently on this score. Among those in single rooms there was no correlation between number of friends and esprit; among those in double rooms and suites, personal spirits were higher for those who had more friends. This would indicate more strongly than the evidence we dis­cussed in Chapter 3 that students in singles made fewer close friends than other students because making friends at M.I.T. was a less important goal for them. They chose the singles in the first place because they gave their highest priority to work.

There was a great spread in the number of friends freshmen reported having before they came to M.LT., but a much smaller spread in the number they made during the first year here. Freshmen who had had many close friends in high school had lower esprit at the end of the freshman year than those who had had few. These formerly gregarious freshmen were also the light studiers in high school. Thus we can add still another factor to the complex of causes which produced low morale. Not only were these young men making a difficult attempt to change their study habits-which was not yet rewarding them with improved grades-but they also had to give up their accus­tomed sociability.

VALUES AND MORALE

Whether a freshman had high or low morale depended partly on the "fit" between his personal values and M.I.T.'s inescap­able demands. If these coincided fairly well, he was likely to be content; if not, he was in difficulty.

We have seen that morale was closely related to academic performance. This might mean either that M.LT. recruits stu­dents who put high value on performance to begin with or that the climate of values at M.LT. makes excellent performance the chief basis for self-esteem, or both.

That there is selective recruitment of high school graduates who want to perform well we have already indicated. Neverthe­less, there were differences within the freshman class in the extent to which students valued academic and nonacademic goals. It is the consequences of these differences which concern us here.

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND VALUES 85

In the summer before they entered the Institute, the fresh­men answered a series of questions about the importance of getting high grades, of finding enjoyment in their academic work, of experiencing college spirit, of distinguishing themselves in extracurricular activities, and of "having fun generally." There was very high consensus on the importance of good grades. On the other questions, however, the class was more divided. Some of the entering freshmen rated having fun, participating in college spirit, and attaining extracurricular distinction "very important," while others rated these things only "somewhat important" or "not important at all." For con­venience in discussion we shall call these nonacademic values "socially oriented." Table 39 (page 86) shows that freshmen who rated socially oriented values important before they came to M.LT. had lower morale at the end of the freshman year than those who placed less importance on them.

Conversely, the students who said before coming to M.I.T. that getting intellectual enjoyment out of their work was very important to them had higher esprit at the end of the year than their classmates.

TABLE 38 ACADEMICALLY ORIENTED VALUES AND MORALE

Importance to the student of getting intellectual

Personal esprit High Medium Low

enjoyment from his academic work Very important Somewhat important 41°{, 26% 33 37 26 37

Total 100% 1001)10 (27) Total numher (101)

Not important (-) ( I ) (1)

(2 )

The reader may surmise that these relationships between values and morale were really another consequence of perform­ance--in the sense that the socially oriented students did less work and performed less well than the others and therefore had lower morale. An effect of that kind was present, but it was not the whole story. Values were also related to morale independ­ently of performance. For example, those freshmen who said that they would choose a job with low pay but the kind of work that interested them most over a job with high pay but less inter­esting work had higher esprit at the end of the year than those who made the converse choice. And this correlation held at all performance levels except the lowest. In other words, those freshmen who had a very high intrinsic interest in what they were studying were in better spirits than other students, regard-

86 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

TABLE 39 SOCIALL Y ORIENTED VALUES AND MORALE

Personal esprit High Medium Low

Total Total number Attitude toward M.I.T. Favorable Medium Unfavorable

Total Total number

Personal esprit High Medium Low

Total Total number Attitude toward M.I.T. Favorable :Medium Unfavorable

Total Total number Personal esprit High Medium Low

Total Total number Attitude toward M.I.T. Favorable Medium llnfavorable

Total Total number

Importance to student 0/ "having fun generally" Very Somewhat Not important important important 27% 32% 42% 27 40 26 % 28 ~

100% 100% 100% (33) (75) (19)

33(,1c, 40c/o 58% 33 36 26 33 24 16

99 'X) 100% 100% (33) (75) (19) Importance to student 0/ extracurricular distinction 32% 39% 54r;to 42 33 29 26 27 17

10 0 r/; , 99(X, 100% (33) (72) (24)

26% 31 (!;, %% 32 37 29 42 32 25

100~;) 100% 100% (31) (72) (24) Importance 0/ school spirit 32r;to 41r;to ( 3 ) 36 27 (2 ) 32 32 (-)

100% 100% (-) (59) (68) ( 5 )

34% 38% ( 3 ) 24 39 (-) 42 23 ( 2)

100Sto 100% (-) (59) (68) (5 )

less of whether their grades were very good or only fairly good. Only when grades were poor did discouragement overbalance the effect of enthusiasm for the subject matter. Besides, while it is true that students with socially oriented values worked less than others, they did not work much less. Freshmen time bud­gets were not a simple reflection of the students' preferences but a compromise between their values and the curricular demands. Many students worked long hours and enjoyed it, but others worked long hours because they had to. Under these circumstances there was no correlation between the amount of

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND VALUES 87

time that freshmen studied and their morale. Only when time budgets were considered together with values did any relation­ship to the students' attitudes appear.

One important attitude was resentment of the workload. The feeling of resentment was measured by several questions, one of which appears in Table 40 below. This table shows that regardless of whether they were working little or much, the freshmen with socially oriented values were more resentful of the workload than the others.

TABLE 40 SOCIALLY ORIENTED VALUES, HOURS OF STUDY, AND RESENT-

MENT OF WORKLOAD

Student said he was:

Working hard but enjoying it very much Working harder than he liked but felt it a worth­while investment in his future Not having as much fun as he ought to be having at

Freshmen who studied Freshmen who fewer than 35 studied 35 or more hours weekly- hours weekly-having fun having fun generally is generally is

4% 33% 28% 30% 50%

67 51 62 58 62 50

his age 29 16 14 8

Total 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% Total number (21) (45) (8) (14) (37) (10)

On the other side of the coin we can look at the freshmen's satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the amount of recreation they were getting. Once again we see that the amount of time the student was giving to recreation does not by itself account

TABLE 41 SOCIALLY ORIENTED VALUES, HOURS TO DATING AND SOCIALIZ­

ING, AND SATISFACTION WITH AMOUNT OF RECREATION

Student was: Dissatisfied with amount of recreation Satisfied with

Fewer than 20 hours Twenty or more hours weekly to dating weekly to dating and socializing- and socializing-having fun was having fun was Very or some- Not im- Very or some- Not im-what important portant what important portant

31% 44% 17%

amount of recreation 53 69 56 83

Total Total number

100% (74)

100% (13)

100% (56)

100% (6)

88 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

for his attitude; values must also be considered. Among students giving much time to dating and socializing, those with socially oriented values were nevertheless more dissatisfied than those who did not have these values; the same held true among stu­dents giving little time to these social activities (Table 41) .

What we see in these relationships among time budgets, values, and attitudes is another aspect of a process we have already examined. In Chapter 3 we showed that students who had worked little in high school made the most drastic upward shifts in study time of all the freshmen when they came to M.LT. but that they nevertheless ended by giving less time to studies than their previously hardworking classmates. In complemen­tary fashion they also made the most drastic cuts in the amount of time they allocated to recreation, but nevertheless ended spending more time in play than their classmates. Now we see that in adjusting their life styles to the demands of M.LT., they paid a price in resentment. For it was the freshmen who had worked little and played much in high school who had the most socially oriented values; and it was they who most resented the heavy work routine they were constrained to follow at M.I.T.

TABLE 42 TIME TO DATING AND SOCIALIZING IN HIGH SCHOOL

AND RESENTMENT OF WORKLOAD AT M.I.T.

Low resentment of workload High resentment of workload

Total Total number

Number of hours weekly freshmen gave to dating and socializing in high school Fewer than 11 Eleven or more

70% 38%

30 62

100% 100% (102) (34)

The freshmen's feelings about how much work "ought" to be asked of them and how much recreation they were "entitled" to have were extrapolated from the way they had lived while attending high school. Those who were unaccustomed to heavy work demands felt that the workload at M.LT. was heavier than it should be and that they were having less in the way of a good time than their youth gave them a right to expect. Tables 43 and 44 show that these sentiments of resentment and dissatisfaction went along with low personal esprit.

TABLE 43 PERSONAL ESPRIT AND RESENTMENT OF WORKLOAD

Personal esprit Resentment of workload High Medium Low Total Total number Low 53% 28 19 100% (70) High 22% 37 41 100% (63)

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND VALUES 89

TABLE 44 PERSONAL ESPRIT AND SATISFACTION WITH RECREATION

Personal esprit Satisfaction with recreation Low

High Medium Low 28% 38 34

Total 100% 100%

Total number (64)

High 46% 28 26 (72)

There is one further point to be made about socially oriented values: they were not randomly distributed among the fresh­men. These values are almost identical with what we labeled in our interim report as the "sociability" complex. In Chapter 2 of the interim report we described the pattern of selectivity in fraternity pledging. We showed (1) that the socially oriented values were held more often by freshmen coming from high­income than from low-income families; and (2) that freshmen who held such values were both more likely to come to Rush Week and more likely to pledge a fraternity than those who did not hold them.

The idea that students from high-income families are more apt to hold socially oriented values helps to explain the relation­ship between family income and personal esprit shown in Table 45. Freshmen from relatively low-income families were in higher spirits at the end of the first year than those from high­income families. This was partly due to their better perform­ance, but it held true within performance levels as well.

TABLE 45

Esprit High Medium Low

FAMILY INCOME AND PERSONAL ESPRIT'"

Family income Family income under $10,000 $10,000 or more High and medium-high academic performance 52% 43% 31 30 17 27

Total 1000';' 100%

(11) Total number (47) Esprit High "Medium Low

Medium-low and low academic performance 36% 22% 33 45 31 33

Total 1000~ 100~~ (26) Total number (54)

* The reaner can see that low-income freshmen were bctter performers than high-income freshmen by examining the total numbers. There was clearly a greater proportion of relatively low-income freshmen at the high performance level. This probably reflects the oft-demonstrated fact that American youngsters from families of low income have to be intellectually better qualified to get to college than those from families of high income.

It is understandable that some freshmen from low-income homes found success at M.LT. particularly exhilarating since it

90 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

was the first step to what they and their families regarded as prestigeful occupations. More than this, we suspect that many of these students viewed their careers at M.LT. largely in instru­mental terms. In our interim report we showed that they were more likely than the high-income students to have committed themselves definitely to an occupational goal and to have made the decision early. Perhaps it would be fair to say that as long as M.LT. served them well as a ladder to the goal, they de­manded little more of it.1

For students from high-income backgrounds, high occupa­tional status was more assured and therefore more taken for granted. They did not view their college years solely as a step­ladder to an occupation. They hoped also to enjoy themselves and to participate in a vaguely defined but to them important experience which they called "college spirit." Because they did not find this experience in sufficient measure at M.LT., their spirits were somewhat dampened.

It is of no small interest to note that the study of the Ivy League women's college mentioned in Chapter 4 found the re­verse relationship between family income and student morale: girls from high-income families were happier at this school than those from families of (relatively) low income. In other words, the demands of a specific college environment may be more or less congruent with the class-determined values the student brings with him. We are suggesting that the M.I.T. environment is most congenial to the upwardly mobile sons of middle class and working class families who are single­mindedly bent on occupational achievement.

The second point-that freshmen with socially oriented values are more likely to come to Rush Week and to pledge a fraternity -helps to clarify a finding presented earlier in this chapter. We showed that fraternity members, despite being more satisfied with their living groups on every score than other freshmen, did not have higher morale than their classmates. In part, this was due to the counterbalancing effect of their lower performance. But it was also due in part to the counterbalancing effect of their more socially oriented values.

1 This appears to contradict a finding of Stephenson (op. cit.) that among ninth graders, those of higher class position were more definite in their occupational choices. However, we have already suggested in our interim report that low-income freshmen at M.LT. differ from their class peers, most of whom are not in college.

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND VALUES 91

RELATIONS WITH THE FACULTY

In the women's college mentioned above, it was found that stu­dents who reported they were personally known to a large num­ber of faculty members had higher morale than those who reported that few instructors knew them. Upperclassmen, of course, were known to more faculty members than lowerclass­men. This is another of those situations where it is difficult to disentangle cause and effect without making a longitudinal study. Do students with low morale withdraw from contact with the faculty, or does failure to make such contact lower morale? It is particularly difficult to draw a conclusion, since in all probability both processes occur and are mutually reinforcing.

In our intensive interviews with a few M.LT. freshmen, some complained that "Noone knows who I am or where I am or what I'm doing." On the other hand, nearly all insisted-in the face of a leading suggestion to the contrary-that the faculty was helpful and concerned whenever the students took the initiative in approaching them. It appeared, however, that some students who would have liked more contact with the faculty failed to take the initiative at all, and most students failed to take it very often. Freshmen felt that faculty members were busy men who ought not to be disturbed without good reason. Some faculty members communicated to their classes a feeling that they were not interested in students, and one may guess that they were very rarely approached. Others communicated their interest, and they probably saw freshmen more often after class and out­side of the classroom. But aside from the attitudes of individual instructors, the behavior of freshmen was affected by the gen­eral M.LT ideology of independence. Whatever their private sentiments, freshmen felt that independence was a sign of ma­turity, that M.I.T. expected it of them, and that they had to strive very hard to meet the expectation.

Of course, the transition from dependence on adults to inde­pendence is the most general demand which our society makes on adolescents; the attendant difficulties are not unique to M.LT. One suspects that the freshmen's perception of their situation­that they were expected to be independent, that only a minimal amount of adult guidance would be imposed on them, but that help was readily available if they asked for it-was exactly the way the administration and faculty intended them to see it. Whether M.LT. goes further in this direction than other men's colleges of high quality we do not know. Personal relationships

92 MORALE AND ITS DETERMINANTS

with faculty members on which students can draw for many kinds of support are probably more frequent in smaller, more exclusively teaching-oriented schools. Even more important, per­haps, is our earlier observation that M.LT. seems to lack the strong peer groups which enable many adolescents to help each other through the crises of achieving independence.

We have already presented some findings with respect to one aspect of the independence problem. In Chapter 3 we showed that many freshmen underwent a change of heart concerning academic independence between the summer before they entered M.I.T. and the end of their freshman year; a large number shifted from a position of preferring to be given much responsi­bility for their own learning to wanting their instructors to take more responsibility for helping them to learn in the classroom. Freshmen with high grades were most likely to accept the situa­tion as it was or to want even more independence than they were getting-although even among them, 42 per cent wished they could depend on their instructors more. Among all other students a majority expressed this wish, and among low per­formers the majority was very large.

Furthermore, the freshmen who wished they could depend more on their instructors had lower esprit and less favorable attitudes toward M.LT. than the others, and this held true at all four performance levels.

As one would expect, it was the freshmen who felt they were not getting all the help they needed in class who were most likely to initiate a conference about work with their instructors out­side the classroom-although 61 per cent of the freshmen had had at least one such conference in the course of the year.

While it is quite clear that most of the freshmen were put more on their own than they found comfortable, it also appears that, like it or not, freshmen accepted the idea that they ought to work independently. Only 39 per cent said that they "usually" sought help when they were having trouble with their work­and most of these sought it from other students in their living groups. The remainder indicated that they tried to avoid asking for help often. The main reasons given, in the order of their fre­quency, were: "I learn things better when I work them out for myself"; "I ought to get it for myself"; and "Other people are busy and I can't impose on them." The discrepancy between their desire to have more help from their instructors and the belief that they ought to be able to do it themselves may partly account for the lower morale of the "dependent" freshmen.

CONCLUSION

This study does not tell us whether the morale of M.I.T. fresh­men is high or low compared with that of other freshman classes. Probably freshman morale at M.LT. resembles that of first-year students in graduate professional schools more closely than that of liberal arts freshmen. Here lies one of the built-in problems of all engineering schools. Since they offer profes­sional training, their demands on the students' time and motiva­tion are those of the professional school-but the students are not as mature and as committed to their fields as are graduate students. We saw that in fact the entering freshman at M.I.T., while he expected superb professional training, also expected to lead the life of a college man. And his model of the college man was implicitly derived from the liberal arts campuses where the "well-rounded man" and the "gentleman's C" are still function­ing ideals.

Both our major findings flow directly from this situation. First, M.LT., like all professional schools, is performance­oriented. We demonstrated that this was true of freshmen, and there is little doubt that it is still more true of the faculty. Stu­dents who turned in a poor academic performance relative to their classmates also had lower morale than their classmates. And it must be emphasized that this was so for many freshmen who had passing, close-to-average, and even average grades.

93

94 CONCLUSION

There is a popular theory, most recently propounded by the President of the California Institute of Technology, that low morale arises from the sudden, hard fall which some freshmen take. Used to being at the top of their classes, they find them­selves at the bottom of the new one. This hypothesis is sound, but it is not the whole story. The transition may be painful, but its difficulty can be enhanced or decreased by the college en­vironment itself. To the extent that the college makes grades the almost exclusive measure of the man, to the extent that alternative standards of personal excellence are not evolved by strong student peer groups, to the extent that college life pro­vides few gratifications other than the triumphs of academic success, the difficulties of those who lose their accustomed aca­demic prestige are aggravated. The M.I.T. environment appears to have this effect.

The freshmen at the lower end of the grading curve cling to their ambitions for high grades; but this tenacity of purpose neither improves their performance nor protects them from anxiety, resentment, and apathy. Very often the core of their problem is an absence of the capacity to put in long and effec­tive hours of study-a disadvantage which is not easily over­come in the course of just one year.

We also saw that the freshmen who came to M.LT. with the strongest hopes for a typical "collegiate" experience-that is, for an experience of community, of college spirit, and of a rewarding social life-were the most disappointed. Their morale was lower than that of freshmen who viewed M.I.T. largely as a ladder to an occupational goal.

If this diagnosis is correct, the problem of low morale among some M.I.T. freshmen has no easy solution. It is simple to think of measures which would make freshmen happier, but difficult to calculate the costs which such measures might entail. The only way to find out about gains and costs is to experiment.

At the end of Chapter 5 we suggested some "reforms" re­lated to the possible overemphasis at M.LT. on high grades. Here we would like in addition to repeat what others have already said1 and what our findings reinforce: Living groups at M.I.T. are less satisfactory than they might be. Dormitory life would contribute more to student morale if it did not force a choice between social isolation and poor study conditions. The

1 See the Report of the Committee on Student Housing, Edwin D. Ryer, Chairman (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956) .

CONCLUSION 95

too-large size of the dormitories and the absence of facilities for the living group to eat all meals together mean that those stu­dents who choose to live in single rooms may find themselves lost in anonymity. On the other hand, those who choose suites find friends but pay a price in distraction from work. The fact that a student chooses a single room does not mean he prefers to be alone all the time, and the fact that he chooses a suite does not mean that he has no need for silence when the times comes for study. Freshmen will always vary in their needs for being alone and being with others. A good dormitory, by its physical arrangements and social routine, can rule out the extremes of continual isolation and continual bull session while leaving plenty of room for individual differences. A well-planned dormitory provides the physical conditions for satisfactory group life. And satisfactory group life means daily gratifications which would automatically offset the too-exclusive importance of grades.

In a larger sense, the "problem" of M.LT. is not merely to create a community of undergraduates but to create a com­munity centered on values which stem from intellectual and scientific pursuits. The faculty are the best representatives of these values. Philip Jacob reports that American undergradu­ates usually hold their instructors in mild contempt, l but this is not the case at M.LT. The intellectual competence of the faculty is very highly esteemed by students. Since values are usually learned from warmly respected models, such a faculty in inti­mate daily contact with students could probably set the tone of community life.

The difficulty is how to attain the necessary intensiveness of faculty-student contact. Perhaps unfortunately, the trend of American universities is in quite the opposite direction. An emphasis on contributions to one's discipline as over against good teaching and concern with undergraduates pervades our university faculties and even some of our college faculties. It cannot be otherwise, since career advancement for faculty mem­bers depends far more on the former than the latter. As long as this situation prevails, the interest of faculties in undergraduates is unlikely to increase.

1 Jacob, op. cit.

APPENDIX

TABLE Al OCCUPATIONS OF FRESHMEN'S FATHERS COMPARED WITH THE

OCCUPATIONS OF WHITE MALES I."i THE U.S. LABOR FORCE IN

1958 Freshmen's fathers

Professional and technical workers 3170 Proprietors, managers, and officials 41 Clerical and other white·collar workers 9 Skilled workers 12 Semiskilled and unskilled workers 4 Service workers 2 Farmers 1

Total Total number

100% (788)

U.S. labor force* 11.9% 11.5 22.4 14.3 21.8 10.0

8.1

10070 (51,108,000)

* All population data for any year later than 1950 are taken from the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1958, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.

TABLE A2 INCOMES OF FRESHMEN'S FAMILIES

COMPARED WITH FAMILY INCOME

FOR THE U.S. POPULATION IN 1956

Income Under $5,000 $5,000-$10,000 $10,000-$15,000 $15,000-$25,000 Over $25,000

Total Total number of families

Freshmen's U.S. families population 16% 51.7% 48 37.S 16 6.7 12 1 S S 3.S

100% 100%

(773) (52,SOO,000)

97

98 APPENDIX

TABLE A3 EDUCATION OF FRESHMEN'S FATHERS COMPARED WITH ALL U.S. MALES AGED 35-55 IN 1950*

Freshmen's fathers All U.S. males 35-55 52% Grammar school graduate or less

Some high school High school graduate Some college College graduate or more

8% 12 24 13 43

18 18 6 6

Total Total number

100% (791)

100% (18,017,160)

* The comparison with 1950 is not altogether desirable, since the average years of education of the U.S. population has been rising with fabulous speed in recent decades. However, if we make a comparison with the U.S. population at a more recent date, we suffer from the unavailability of figures broken down by the age group 35-55 which we are using. The nearest possible comparison is the one with all U.S. males aged 18-64 for the year 1957. Here the educational attainments of the U.S. population look more like those of M.LT. fathers than do our 1950 data above, but this may be largely due to the superior education of the 18-35-year-olds included in the 1957 data. Just because the educational attainments of the population are rising rapidly, the younger people have on the average more schooling than their elders.

TABLE A4 NUMBER OF CLOSE FRIENDS AND LIVING GROUP

Number of close friends Four

Three or through More than Living group fewer ten ten Total Total number Baker 33% 59 8 100% (12) Burton 24% 63 13 100% (38) East Campus 34% 55 11 100% (27) Fraternities 20% 30 50 100% (46)

TABLE A5 NUMBER OF CLOSE FRIENDS AND TYPE OF ROOM

Number of Single Double More than two in close friends room room room or suite None 14% 6% One 4 6 5% Two 10 4 5 Three 23 10 5 Four to six 41 38 39 Seven to ten 4 18 9 More than ten 4 18 37

Total 100% 100% 100% Total number (22) (47) (57)

APPENDIX

TABLE A6 TIME PER WEEK TO STUDY

At secondary school At M.l.T. Under 10 hours 24% Under 15 hours 10-14 hours 27 15-19 hours 15-20 hours 31 20-24 hours More than 20 hours 18 25-29 hours

Total number 100%

(810)

30-34 hours 35-39 hours 40-45 hours More than 45 hours

Total number

4% 4

12 16 20 17 18 9

100% (139)

TABLE A7 TIME PER WEEK TO EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

AND HOBBIES

A t secondary school Under 10 hours 10%

33 31 26

10-19 hours 20-29 hours 30 or more hours

Total number 100%

(805)

At M.l.T. None 1-5 hours 6-9 hours 10-19 hours 20-29 hours 30 or more hours

Total number

6% 11 13 43 25 2

100% (139)

TABLE A8 SHIFTS IN AMOUNT OF STUDY TIME BETWEEN SECONDARY

SCHOOL AND M.I.T.

H ours per week to study at M.l.T. Under 20 20-30 30-34 35 or more

Total number

Hours per week to study in secondary school 0-10 10-14 19% 3% 29 33 16 21 36 43

100% (31)

100% (33)

14-19 3%

34 26 37

100% (35)

20 or more

12% 16 72

100% (32)

TABLE A9 SHIFTS IN NUMBER OF EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

BETWEEN SECONDARY SCHOOL AND M.I.T.

Number of extracurricular activities at M.l.T. 0-3 4 or 5 6 or more Total number (138)

Number of extracurricular activities in secondary school 1 to 3 4 or 5 6 or more (Number of freshmen) ( 4) (17) (-) ( 3) ( 4) ( 4) ( 8) (24)

(78) ( 9) (19)

(106)

99

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