Study: Background impacts experience

The Undergraduate Student Government’s Committee on Background and Opportunity presented the findings from its COMBO III survey on Monday afternoon, revealing that students’ backgrounds had a statistically significant influence on their Princeton experience.

The USG administered the COMBO III survey to undergraduate students in June, and 1,857 students answered questions that revealed the influence of gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, high school, home environment and other such factors on the students’ university experiences.

The COMBO Data Analysis Committee statistically analyzed the information collected through the survey to draw several conclusions.

“What we found most surprising about these results was the extent and significance to which students of different backgrounds had barriers to accessing different campus resources,” USG president Michael Yaroshefsky ’12 said.

Yaroshefsky said that the discrepancies among students with certain background types were far more significant than anticipated.

For example, according to the results of the survey, athletes were more likely than non-athletes to report feeling comfortable with using campus resources: While 43.17 percent of athletes reported using the Writing Center, only 36.35 percent of non-athletes used the resource.

Similarly, non-religious students were more likely to feel comfortable with academic and career resources while religious students tended to report that they “tried to avoid” office hours, the Writing Center, the McGraw Center and peer tutoring.

In addition, the survey found that geographic background impacted a student’s confidence level for college work: 51 percent of students from rural backgrounds reported feeling unprepared by their high school for coursework at Princeton whereas only 24 percent of students from other areas reported the same.

On the topic of students’ well-being, the survey revealed that factors such as gender, race and sexual orientation created significant discrepancies in levels of mental health among student groups.

For instance, female students were significantly more likely to report feeling depressed, overwhelmed or out of place.

They also reported having experienced more new mental health issues since coming to Princeton than male students.

The number of black students reporting feeling depressed was 60.6 percent higher than white students, and black students were twice as likely as white students to mark “Not Applicable” when asked to rate their comfort level with accessing their Residential College Advisors.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Students who identified as “not straight” were more likely than straight students to report new health problems since coming to Princeton and less likely to report confidence in leadership ability or comfort talking to RCAs, using Career Services and joining student groups.

The results of the COMBO III survey will have notable impacts on student life, Yaroshefsky said, as the USG will use them to determine the course of future projects.

“This is going to be a critical support to not only ‘why’ but also ‘how’ we should make sure that the barriers to students’ happiness and health are eliminated,” Yaroshefsky explained, stating that the survey will contribute largely to the projects of the next USG administration.

“Our goals are to identify the relationship between students’ backgrounds and the way they experience the opportunities offered at Princeton, to inspire meaningful dialogue between stakeholders, to inform policies and to identify cases of success,” said USG president-elect Bruce Easop ’13, who was also a member of the team which led the design and analysis of the survey.

COMBO administered its first survey in spring 2007 and its second, COMBO II, in spring 2009.

Moving forward, the group hopes to make comparisons between data of different COMBO surveys, according to Yaroshefsky.

“We look forward to providing more individualized and more detailed analysis of interest to specific groups,” Easop explained.

The next survey that the USG plans to administer is the Academic Life Total Assessment, which will take place during reading period and address issues affecting student life such as grading policy, precepts, workload and the academic calendar.