LOS ANGELES – Pitzer College freshman Adam Forbes spent his fall break in Mississippi as a volunteer helping to salvage homes flooded in the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Forbes, who coordinated the effort at his Claremont Colleges school, was joined by 10 other Pitzer students, half of them also freshmen. The task involved hard labor, but finding volunteers willing to work in the muck “was easier than I expected,” he said.

That spirit, perhaps inspired by Katrina and other natural disasters in recent years, appears to reflect a broader pattern among freshmen this year at four-year colleges and universities around the country, University of California, Los Angeles, researchers say.

In its annual “The American Freshman” survey released Wednesday, UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute reported that first-year undergraduates’ interest in performing community service and assisting the needy has surged.

The survey – based on polls last fall of 263,710 freshmen at 385 of the nation’s four-year schools – found that 66.3 percent believe it is very important or essential to help others in difficulty. That figure, up from 62.4 percent in 2004, is the highest percentage in 25 years.

In addition, 26.3 percent said there was a “very good” chance they would participate in volunteer or community service while in college, up from 24.1 percent a year earlier and the highest since researchers began asking that question in 1990. In all, 67.3 percent of freshmen said there was at least “some” chance they would do such work.

These and other findings in the survey demonstrate that this year’s freshman class “cares about civic and social responsibilities,” said John H. Pryor, director of the UCLA survey.

Pryor and other researchers who worked on the survey said the outlook probably stems partly from disasters, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, that occurred during the freshman students’ senior year of high school, and Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast in August as many of them were preparing to begin college.

Those events occurred at “an impressionable time in their lives,” said Sylvia Hurtado, director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute and a co-author of the report. She said the survey findings reflect a significant break from a pattern in recent years of students mainly focusing on self-interest, including such goals as making more money.