The Student Experience

The undergraduate lowdown

Latest surveys offer a 360-degree view of Berkeley’s student body — from 20 common school-related worries, to the 70 languages spoken at home, to the impact of sleep (or its lack) on GPA

By Cathy Cockrell

Spring 2008 | American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “[The] studious class… [is] thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep…” — an apt description, perhaps, for some of Berkeley’s bookish. But for a detailed, 21st-century campus overview — capturing students’ family backgrounds, study habits, time use, social attitudes, even how they get their news — it pays to go straight to the source.

Thousands of Berkeley students each spring answer an extensive online questionnaire known as the “UC Undergraduate Experience Survey” (UCUES). Motivated by the chance to win cash, iPods, and other prizes, 11,957 out of 23,278 spring-semester undergrads (51%) answered the survey’s myriad queries.

Here are some of the latest UCUES findings on the Berkeley student body. Also included are highlights from recent surveys of new freshman and transfer students, and of undergrads’ high-tech ownership and use, conducted by the campus’s Office of Student Research.

Family affairs
For nearly two in five Berkeley undergrads, English is a second language, and tongues spoken at home number at least 70 — from Armenian and Catalan to Mandarin, Navajo, and Yoruba. More than a quarter of undergrads are foreign born; 40 percent have one or both parents born outside the U.S.; and nearly a third are the first in their family to attend college.

To stay connected with home, 24% of students talk to their parents daily by telephone, while 81% speak with them by phone once a week or more. E-mail is the next most common means of staying in touch — with 32% e-mailing their folks at least once a week. Meanwhile, 15% say they visit in person with their parents weekly, while 13% text message them.

School matters
Berkeley’s academic reputation and the stiff competition for admission are sources of stress for many new freshmen in the weeks prior to their move to campus. Asked to name the one thing that most concerned them, from a list of 20 common worries, 28% chose “being able to excel at Berkeley the way I excelled in high school,” and 14% chose “being able to maintain a high enough GPA.”

Cal undergraduates report spending, on average, about 17 hours per week in classes, class sections, and labs, and 16 hours studying outside of class (about half of what faculty members typically expect).

The most popular intended major for new freshmen is business administration (as it is for students nationwide) — a practical choice, considering that 31% expect that they and/or their parents will need to repay $20,000 in educational loans by the time they graduate. Molecular and cell biology is the second most popular intended major; third is Middle Eastern studies (which has never before made the top five), tied with engineering and engineering science. Electrical engineering and computer sciences came in fourth, political science fifth.

Asked “what factors were very important to you in deciding on your major,” 75% of juniors and seniors with declared majors cite intellectual curiosity. The second most common reason is to prepare for a fulfilling career (48%). Money ranks third (22%). Far fewer chose a major based on their parents’ wishes or on easy requirements for the major (7% each). First- and second-generation immigrants are considerably more likely than others to major in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.

Where the time goes
Eighty-three percent participate in some form of recreational sports or exercise, averaging seven hours a week (while 18% reported spending zero time moving their bodies). Almost half  could use more R&R: close to 47% report that stress has interfered with their schoolwork or academic success all the time or frequently; 43% say the same about sleep deprivation.

Intriguingly, transcript records appear to support the importance of sleep to academic performance, says David Radwin, an analyst with the Office of Student Research. On average, students who sleep at least seven hours per weeknight earn a GPA about a tenth of a letter grade higher than those who get just five to six hours — and nearly 
0.3 points higher (about the difference between a B+ and a B) than students who sleep less than five hours.

Besides shuteye and studies, 38% of undergrads spend 11 or more hours per week socializing with friends. Their percentage of time spent on the computer is even higher: 44% spend 11 hours or more a week instant messaging, playing games, shopping, as well as participating in other non-academic computer-based activities.
According to a 2006 technology survey, virtually all Berkeley undergrads own a computer, and 94% own a cell phone. Four-fifths of them use the popular social networking site Facebook, and nearly half visit it daily.

Leaning left
At Berkeley 55% of students who were eligible to vote say they cast a ballot in the November 2006 mid-term election. (A caveat: Research shows that surveys typically over-report voter turnout by several percentage points.) As a rough comparison, voter turnout in 2006 among 18- to 29-year-olds was estimated at 24% nationally and 25% for California.

Berkeley undergrads do lean leftward — though perhaps not as far as some imagine. Sixty-three percent consider themselves slightly to very liberal, 22% are in the middle of the road, and 16% call themselves some flavor of conservative. Self-identified Democrats outnumber the GOP-identified by more than five to one.

Asked to name their main source of news and public-affairs information, a solid majority (66%) chose the Internet, trailed at a great distance by metropolitan daily newspapers (8%). Student journalists may be pleasantly surprised to learn that The Daily Californian, at 7%, tops all the remaining choices of news source: national and local TV news, public radio, weekly news magazines, public TV, and talk radio (in order of most popular to least).

Read a five-part series on the survey results.