Empathy

• Eroding Student Empathy (Inside Higher Ed)

College students today are not as empathetic as college students were in the 1980s and 1990s, according to an analysis by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. The study – based on an analysis of student surveys over a 30-year period – was presented last week at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. Students were categorized based on how the responded to statements such as "I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective" or "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."

IHR provides a link:

• Empathy: College students don't have as much as they used to (U of Michigan news service)

…"We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000," said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait."
. . .
In a related but separate analysis, Konrath found that nationally representative samples of Americans see changes in other people's kindness and helpfulness over a similar time period.

"Many people see the current group of college students—sometimes called 'Generation Me'—as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history," said Konrath, who is also affiliated with the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry….

• Scholarship Will Go to Illegal-Immigrant Students (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Santa Ana College, a two-year institution in Southern California, is creating a $2,500 scholarship for illegal-immigrant students in memory of a former student who was killed in a highway accident in Maine last month, The Orange County Register reported. The scholarship will honor Tam Ngoc Tran, who was an illegal immigrant herself in pursuit of citizenship and had testified before Congress in favor of the Dream Act. She was a graduate student at Brown University at the time of her death.

The planned scholarship has drawn an outraged response from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, who threatened in a letter to the college's president to try to yank the institution's federal money. He called the scholarship "an affront to law-abiding citizens" that showed "a misguided set of priorities." In a news release, the college noted that the scholarship would be offered by the Santa Ana College Foundation, its separate fund-raising arm.