Social/Political Liberalism Among Freshmen at Selective Private Institutions: A CIRP Data Sharing Project. AIR 1993 Annual Forum Paper.

The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) database based on the American Freshmen Survey provides data for use in making marketing and management decisions in colleges and universities. This paper describes an operational cooperative model for managing and exploiting the data that CIRP makes available. The paper also offers an example of the substantive insights that can be derived from such cooperation. Additional sections: (1) provide a description of a project for sharing CIRP data among the members of an existing consortium, the institutions that are involved in the effort, and the student data in the resulting database; (2) discuss the scales used in the study constructed from the CIRP measures of social and political values and the creation of a general index of liberalism; (3) examine the differences among and within institutions on this index; (4) explore the characteristics of institutions that appear to contribute to differences in the social/political orientations of their freshmen classes; and (5) provide summary observations and suggestions for further research. Analysis suggested that various institutional characteristics and student academic orientations (i.e., intended major) are associated with measurable differences on an index of social/political liberalism. (GLR)