But it would not be very satisfactory to leave our conclusions at the point just reached.
Fortunately, it is possible to be somewhat more concrete and factual in diagnosing the involvement of values in education.
For this purpose we now draw upon data from sociological and psychological studies of students in American colleges and universities, and particularly from the Cornell Values Studies.
In the latter research program, information is available for 2,758 Cornell students surveyed in 1950 and for 1,571 students surveyed in 1952.
Of the latter sample, 944 persons had been studied two years earlier;
hence changes in attitudes and values can be analyzed for identical individuals at two points in time.
In addition, the 1952 study collected comparable data from 4,585 students at ten other colleges and universities scattered across the country: Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Wesleyan, North Carolina, Fisk, Texas, University of California at Los Angeles, Wayne, and Michigan.

We find, in the first place, that the students overwhelmingly approve of higher education, positively evaluate the job their own institution is doing, do not accept most of the criticisms levelled against higher education in the public prints, and, on the whole, approve of the way their university deals with value-problems and value inculcation.
It is not our impression that these evaluations are naively uncritical resultants of blissful ignorance;
rather, the generality of these students find their university experience congenial to their own sense of values.

Students are approximately equally divided between those who regard vocational preparation as the primary goal of an ideal education and those who chose a general liberal education.
Other conceivable goals, such as character-education and social adjustment, are of secondary importance to them.
The ideal of a liberal education impresses itself upon the students more and more as they move through college.
Even in such technical curricula as engineering, the senior is much more likely than the freshman to choose, as an ideal, liberal education over specific vocational preparation.
In the university milieu of scholarship and research, of social diversity, of new ideas and varied and wide-ranging interests, "socialization" into a campus culture apparently means heightened appreciation of the idea of a liberal education in the arts and sciences.

Students' choices of ideal educational goals are not arbitrary or whimsical.
There is a clear relationship between their educational evaluations and their basic pattern of general values.
The selective and directional qualities of basic value-orientations are clearly evident in these data: the "success-oriented" students choose vocational preparation, the "other-directed" choose goals of social adjustment ("getting along with people"), the "intellectuals" choose a liberal arts emphasis.

The same patterned consistency shows itself in occupational choices.
There is impressive consistency between specific occupational preferences and the student's basic conception of what is for him a good way of life.
And, contrary to many popular assertions, the goal-values chosen do not seem to us to be primarily oriented to materialistic success nor to mere conformity.
Our students want occupations that permit them to use their talents and training, to be creative and original, to work with and to help other people.
They also want money, prestige, and security.
But they are optimistic about their prospects in these regards;
they set limits to their aspirations -- few aspire to millions of dollars or to "imperial" power and glory.
Within the fixed frame of these aspirations, they can afford to place a high value on the expressive and people-oriented aspects of occupation and to minimize the instrumental-reward values of power, prestige, and wealth.

Occupational choices are also useful -- and interesting -- in bringing out clearly that values do not constitute the only component in goals and aspirations.
For there is also the "face of reality" in the form of the individual's perceptions of his own abilities and interests, of the objective possibilities open to him, of the familial and other social pressures to which he is exposed.
We find "reluctant recruits" whose values are not in line with their expected occupation's characteristics.
Students develop occupational images -- not always accurate or detailed -- and they try to fit their values to the presumed characteristics of the imagined occupation.
The purely cognitive or informational problems are often acute.
Furthermore, many reluctant recruits are yielding to social demands, or compromising in the face of their own limitations of opportunity, or of ability and performance.
Thus, many a creativity-oriented aspirant for a career in architecture, drama, or journalism, resigns himself to a real estate business;
many a people-oriented student who dreams of the M.D. decides to enter his father's advertising agency;
and many a hopeful incipient business executive decides it were better to teach the theory of business administration than to practice it.
The old ideal of the independent entrepreneur is extant -- but so is the recognition that the main chance may be in a corporate bureaucracy.

In their views on dating, courtship, sex, and family life, our students prefer what they are expected to prefer.
For them, in the grim words of a once-popular song, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.
Their expressed standards concerning sex roles, desirable age for marriage, characteristics of an ideal mate, number of children desired are congruent with the values and stereotypes of the preceding generation -- minus compulsive rebellion.
They even accept the "double standard" of sex morality in a double sense, i.e., both sexes agree that standards for men differ from standards for women, and women apply to both sexes a standard different from that held by men.

"Conservatism" and "traditionalism" seem implied by what has just been said.
But these terms are treacherous.
In the field of political values, it is certainly true that students are not radical, not rebels against their parents or their peers.
And as they go through college, the students tend to bring their political position in line with that prevalent in the social groups to which they belong.
Yet they have accepted most of the extant "welfare state" provisions for health, security, and the regulation of economic affairs, and they overwhelmingly approve of the traditional "liberalism" of the Bill of Rights.
When their faith in civil liberties is tested against strong pressures of social expediency in specific issues, e.g., suppression of "dangerous ideas", many waver and give in.
The students who are most willing to acquiesce in the suppression of civil liberties are also those who are most likely to be prejudiced against minority groups, to be conformist and traditionalistic in general social attitudes, and to lack a basic faith in people.

As one looks at the existing evidence, one finds a correlation, although only a slight one, between high grades and "libertarian" values.
But the correlation is substantial only among upperclassmen.
In other words, as students go through college, those who are most successful academically tend to become more committed to a "Bill of Rights" orientation.
College in gross -- just the general experience -- may have varying effects, but the students who are successful emerge with strengthened and clarified democratic values.
This finding is consistent also with the fact that student leaders are more likely to be supporters of the values implicit in civil liberties than the other students.

There is now substantial evidence from several major studies of college students that the experience of the college years results in a certain, selective homogenization of attitudes and values.
Detached from their prior statuses and social groups and exposed to the pervasive stimuli of the university milieu, the students tend to assimilate a new common culture, to converge toward norms characteristic of their own particular campus.
Furthermore, in certain respects, there are norms common to colleges and universities across the country.
For instance, college-educated people consistently show up in study after study as more often than others supporters of the Bill of Rights and other democratic rights and liberties.
The interesting thing in this connection is that the norms upon which students tend to converge include toleration of diversity.

To the extent that our sampling of the orientations of American college students in the years 1950 and 1952 may be representative of our culture -- and still valid in 1959 -- we are disposed to question the summary characterization of the current generation as silent, beat, apathetic, or as a mass of other-directed conformists who are guided solely by social radar without benefit of inner gyroscopes.
Our data indicate that these students of today do basically accept the existing institutions of the society, and, in the face of the realities of complex and large-scale economic and political problems, make a wary and ambivalent delegation of trust to those who occupy positions of legitimized responsibility for coping with such collective concerns.
In a real sense they are admittedly conservative, but their conservatism incorporates a traditionalized embodiment of the original "radicalism" of 1776.
Although we have no measures of its strength or intensity, the heritage of the doctrine of inalienable rights is retained.
As they move through the college years our young men and women are "socialized" into a broadly similar culture, at the level of personal behavior.
In this sense also, they are surely conformists.
It is even true that some among them use the sheer fact of conformity -- "everyone does it" -- as a criterion for conduct.
But the extent of ethical robotism is easily overestimated.
Few students are really so faceless in the not-so-lonely crowd of the swelling population in our institutions of higher learning.
And it may be well to recall that to say "conformity" is, in part, another way of saying "orderly human society".

In the field of religious beliefs and values, the college students seem to faithfully reflect the surrounding culture.
Their commitments are, for the most part, couched in a familiar idiom.
Students testify to a felt need for a religious faith or ultimate personal philosophy.
Avowed atheists or freethinkers are so rare as to be a curiosity.
The religious quest is often intense and deep, and there are students on every campus who are seriously wrestling with the most profound questions of meaning and value.
At the same time, a major proportion of these young men and women see religion as a means of personal adjustment, an anchor for family life, a source of emotional security.
These personal and social goals often overshadow the goals of intellectual clarity, and spiritual transcendence.
The "cult of adjustment" does exist.
It exists alongside the acceptance of traditional forms of organized religion (church, ordained personnel, ritual, dogma).
Still another segment of the student population consists of those who seek, in what they regard as religion, intellectual clarity, rational belief, and ethical guidance and reinforcement.

Our first impression of the data was that the students were surprisingly orthodox and religiously involved.
Upon second thought we were forced to realize that we have very few reliable historical benchmarks against which we might compare the present situation, and that conclusions that present-day students are "more" or "less" religious could not be defended on the basis of our data.
As we looked more intently at the content of our belief and the extent of religious participation, we received the impression that many of the religious convictions expressed represented a conventional acceptance, of low intensity.
But, here again, comparative benchmarks are lacking, and we do not know, in any case, what measure of profoundity and intensity to expect from healthy, young, secure and relatively inexperienced persons;
after all, feelings of immortality and invulnerability are standard illusions of youth.
Nor are optimistic and socially-oriented themes at all rare in the distinctive religious history of this country.

Kluckhohn recently has summarized evidence regarding changes in values during a period of years, primarily 1935-1955, but extending much farther back in some instances.
A variety of data are assembled to bear upon such alleged changes as diminished puritan morality, work-success ethic, individualism, achievement, lessened emphasis on future-time orientation in favor of sociability, moral relativism, consideration and tolerance, conformity, hedonistic present-time orientation.
Although he questions the extent and nature of the alleged revival of religion and the alleged increase in conformity, and thinks that "hedonistic" present-time orientation does not have the meaning usually attributed to it, he does conclude that Americans increasingly enjoy leisure without guilt, do not stress achievement so much as formerly, are more accepting of group harmony as a goal, more tolerant of diversity and aware of other cultures.