Abstract

‘This book’, says the author in his opening words, ‘grew out of a request from the Daily Herald to investigate the problems of university students’. As social surveys tend to do, it grew and grew, and became a general study of the interests, opinions, and patterns of behaviour of students in Oxford and Manchester. The greater part of the data on which the report is based was obtained through interviews with the students—interviews which lasted up to two hours, and covered ‘the mental climate and the general atmosphere of the universities, the social and family background of the students, their problems, conflicts, fears and hopes, their aspirations, intentions, plans and prospects as they see them’. Two hundred and five students, chosen at random, were interviewed by Dr Zweig. By design, male students were over-represented in the sample, the proportion of Arts students was greater than in the student body as a whole, and the study was concerned almost exclusively with final year and graduate students, in a ratio of approximately three to one.