New Data on this year's crop of students
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Class of 2011 Heads Back To Campus Wielding More Connections, Concern and Consumer Clout Than Any Class Before Them NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The curriculum may not have changed radically since their older siblings graduated, but for the current crop of matriculating college students heading back to school this Fall, campus life has taken on a significantly new face. In findings released today, Alloy Media + Marketing’s (Nasdaq: ALOY) 7th annual Alloy College Explorer, powered by Harris Interactive®, illuminates the contrast of today’s collegiate perspective from that of four years ago.
The largest college class in history (students ages 18-30) has evolved in three key areas: communication modality, purchase behavior, and concern over world issues. First and most operative distinction, technology has taken students out of the dorm room and morphed communication into mobile rapid fire exchanges fraught with ‘pokes’ and alerts. Four short years ago, being “wired” referred to an over-caffeinated all-nighter, and friends met up on the quad without the option of today’s “online” student union. “Friending” your professor may not seem the proper student-teacher etiquette to the old brigade but for today’s class, it’s the most efficient way to get the grade.
“The distinct comparisons we’ve seen from the 2003 study will have considerable impact on how groups eager to attract the attention of this ever-growing and powerful consumer group should be reaching them," stated Dana Markow, VP Research, Harris Interactive. “Perpetual advancements in technology have had notable impact on students’ daily conduct and as we head into an election year, we’re seeing a class that’s assuming more control over their future.”
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Everyone on Facebook
Facebook Grows Up: Can It Stay Relevant? - Kaplan College Guide - MSNBC.com This would not be surprising if Karasic were a college student. Facebook is as much a part of campus as finals, iPods and beer—the contemporary equivalent of jamming several people into a phone booth is squeezing one's entire social life onto a series of photo shows, news feeds, invitations, friend requests and status updates on the spare blue-and-white grid of a Facebook page. Nor would it be remarkable if she were in high school, where millions of Facebook users, feeling very much like their big brothers and sisters in college, log on as soon as they toss their books on the bed, forming outrageously named groups and moving their lunchroom cliques and locker-room gossip online. Shara Karasic, however, is 40 years old, a Santa Monica, Calif., working mother with a young son. Despite a suspicion that the site was only for college students, she signed on a year ago and found professional people like herself; she quickly got requests to be "friended" from two 40-year-old cousins. And on July 31, when she couldn't get in for a few hours, she realized something: "I'm addicted to Facebook."
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Long Line of Leavers
Young adults aren't sticking with church - USATODAY.com Protestant churches are losing young adults in "sobering" numbers, a survey finds.
Seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30 — both evangelical and mainline — who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23, according to the survey by LifeWay Research. And 34% of those said they had not returned, even sporadically, by age 30. That means about one in four Protestant young people have left the church.
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WORLD Magazine | Weekly News, Christian Views It isn't that evangelical teenagers do not know any better. Some 80 percent of teenagers who say they have been "born again" agree that sex outside of marriage is morally wrong. Still, as many as two-thirds of them violate their own beliefs in their actual behavior.
We can blame the culture. Regnerus gives evidence that correlates the sexual activity in the schools that Christian kids go to with their own behavior. Peer pressure is real, and Christian teenagers are not immune.
But might we also blame the culture of the church? Not only because so many of today's evangelical churches follow the path of cultural conformity as a way to grow bigger and bigger. It goes deeper than that.
Churches used to teach and exemplify self-control, the necessity of keeping one's emotions in check, the discipline of self-denial and mortification of the flesh. Today the typical evangelical church, in its example and practice, cultivates "letting go," emotionalism, self-fulfillment, and an odd religious sensuality.
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Data on Wired Kids
MTV Networks :: New Global Study From MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft Challenges Assumptions About Relationship Between Kids, Youth & Digital Technology The average Chinese young person has 37 online friends he or she has never met, Indian youth are most likely to see mobile phones as a status symbol, while one in three UK and US teenagers say they can't live without their games console.
Globally, the average young person connected to digital technology has 94 phone numbers in his or her mobile phone, 78 people on a messenger buddy list and 86 people in his or her social networking community. Yet despite their technological immersion, digi-kids are not geeks -- 59% of 8-14 year-old kids still prefer their TV to their PCs and only 20% of 14-24 year-old young people globally admitted to being "interested" in technology. They are, however, expert multi-taskers and able to filter different channels of information.
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Textual Criticism
Teen Entrepreneurs Say Email is for Work Only : Dory Devlin : Yahoo! Tech We've heard about how email is yesterday's communication for today's teens before, but here are some pretty compelling comments from young entrepreneurs at the center of teen online life about how teens use tech to communicate. They're from Cnet's Stefanie Olsen's report from the YPulse Mashup 2007 conference in San Francisco.
• Emo Girl Talk podcast host Martina Butler says she only uses email for business and to win sponsors.
• If teens send emails to each other, most only do it via Facebook or another social network.
• Teens text. Period. Asheem Badshah, the teen-aged president of Scriptovia.com, an essay-sharing web site, says: "For me even IM died, and was replaced by text messaging. Facebook will replace e-mail for communicating with certain people."
• Catherine Cook, co-founder of MyYearbook.com, said she still emails some friends, but she sends thousands of text messages a month: "I don't know any teen who doesn't have a phone with them all the time."
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