A national survey of college freshmen shows that young people seem to be increasingly engaged with their times. The American Freshman—National Norms for 2006, a survey of 270,000 entering freshmen conducted by UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program, found that…

1) today’s freshmen are increasingly politically engaged, and, as might be expected, increasingly take sides on issues. The percentage of freshmen identifying as “liberal” is the highest since 1975; the percentage identifying as conservative is the highest in the survey’s 40-year history.

2) Students are increasingly supportive of gay rights, with 61 percent saying that “same sex couples should have the right to legal marital status,” whatever that means. (Why not say “the right to get married”?) Broken down by political self-definition, 84% of liberals agree with that statement, but only 30% of conservatives.

3) Whether liberal or conservative, many students have deep ambivalence about affirmative action and believe it should be abolished—about 45% of liberals and 57% of conservatives.

4) A large and growing majority of students list “helping others who are in difficulty” as “essential” or “very important objectives.” About 67% of all students say that; at all-black colleges, the percentage is even higher, about 77% of students.

The rest say they want to work on Wall Street. (Just kidding!)

5) The number of students who say they want to “influence social values”—i.e., change the world—is at its highest level in 12 years.

I don’t find any of this particularly surprising—what with the war in Iraq, global warming, and the incompetence of the Bush presidency, it’s to be expected that young people would get more engaged with the world. The survey doesn’t break this down by socioeconomic status, but I’d be fascinated to know how political engagement varied with affluence….