Are Your Friends Normal?

For those of you in college, you can find out how closely your friends conform to the norm for 2004 freshmen. This is the 39th year of the well-regarded "American Freshman" survey by UCLA researchers. The executive summary (11 pages, PDF) is available on their website, or you can read a quick article and chart at the CSMonitor.

The oddest piece of data is the percentage of students who say there is a "very good chance" they will socialize with someone of another race in college. Just 60% of whites, and 73% of the smallest ethnic groups, say so. For all races, the percentage is less than the corresponding number for "frequently socialized with a person of another race in high school." Are all these kids going to segregated colleges? Or did they decide that they had enough 'race-mixing' in high school? Weird.

Relative to computer use, the study points out a continuing "Digital Divide". However, the scholars misrepresent their data by using that popular expression. As their chart shows, computer use for all races has been increasing swiftly since 1985. What the data really shows is a "Digital Lag", where all sectors are pushing toward 100% usage, but some are moving faster than others. Even among families with less than $30,000 household income, 66% of blacks who go to college use computers. A true "digital divide" would show that columns of society (whether racial or socio-economic) are being left out of the computer revolution. However, this data shows that even among poor families, students are getting exposure to computers though their parents are usually computer-illiterate. Of course, this is data among college-bound students, so it is not really representative. However, it certainly does not prove the existence of the divide, as the UCLA scholars suggest.

We might know whether the digital divide is real or imaginary in about 20 years, when a fully computerized generation comes of age. If there is a divide, then we should see stable numbers of non-users over time. For now, however, our best efforts can be placed in other aspects of education - computers have a life of their own and the profit motive will saturate society with them much as it did with telephones and automobiles, both of which were once considered signs of wealth.