Sandwiched between a time of squirming under parental control and the tethers of a career, college often means freedom for young people to begin a search for who they are and what they believe.

For some, that may be just a quest for the nearest party. Yet for many students, college is a time to develop spiritually in ways that can endure after they’ve finished school, a new long-term study has found.

“It kind of opens the student’s mind,” Alexander Astin, one of the study’s authors and a professor emeritus of higher education at UCLA, said of the college experience. He called it a period “stimulated by exposure to new people and new ideas.”

Astin said young people often enter college knowing only what they were brought up to believe. They may never have been faced with opposing views. College is a safe haven in which they can explore their spirituality and challenge it.

The spirituality study, launched in 2003, was based on an initial survey of 112,000 American college freshmen, then a follow-up survey of more than 14,000 of the students after they completed their junior year at scores of colleges and universities.

The researchers published their findings in a book released last month, “Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Inner Lives.” Astin’s co-authors were his wife, Helen Astin, who is also a professor of higher education at UCLA, and Jennifer Lindholm, director of the university’s Spirituality in Higher Education project.

The study found that many students struggled with their religious beliefs and became less certain of them during their college years. It also found that many young people eschewed the rituals of organized religion but embraced what the researchers defined as the cornerstones of spirituality: asking the big, existential questions; working to improve one’s community; and showing empathy toward other people.

The researchers also found that students who were more spiritual typically performed better academically, had stronger leadership skills, were more amiable and were generally more satisfied with college.