As colleges work to increase the civic and political participation of their students, they run into a persistent problem: figuring out whether they’re succeeding. Course-enrollment figures, Peace Corps commitment numbers, and student surveys can give institutions some idea of whom they’re reaching. But none measures in a wide-ranging way whether civic education is leading to student and alumni action in the real world.
To help, for the past three years the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, or Nslve (pronounced “en-solve”), a program run by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, has given institutions a baseline measure of how many students are following through on democracy’s most basic civic activity: voting.
“We’ve been so scared of appearing partisan or political that we’re really not educating for democracy,” says Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, at Tufts University. Colleges are trying to change that, honing students’ political and rhetorical reasoning, and broadening their experiences beyond the campus gates.
“We use voting as a proxy for student interest in civic life,” says Nancy Thomas, the institute’s director.
The project collected student information from colleges and election data gathered by private firms. With those, it monitored voter turnout among college students dating back to the 2012 election. It broke out student voting patterns by gender, race, institution type, and groupings of certain majors. (See bar graphs, below.)
The study encompasses the voting records of 9.7 million students on 1,050 U.S. campuses. It can give colleges and universities a glimpse into whether their programming translates into more student involvement in democracy.
Research using the study’s data can also give institutions an idea of what kind of civic programming leads to student action. An institute study of 80 colleges and universities that had high voting rates found, among other things, that the colleges that had trained faculty members on how to calmly facilitate thorny political discussions had more politically involved students.
The study can also point up what doesn’t work. “Voter-registration rates have barely budged in the past four years,” says Ms. Thomas — from 69 percent in 2012 to 70.6 percent in 2016. “So what was the use of all those campus registration drives?”
Comparing student-voting turnout from 2012 and 2016 spotlighted some positive trends over all, including a three-percentage-point rise. Other findings are hardly surprising. The older the students, the higher the voting rate, for example, which might explain why grad students vote at higher percentages than undergrads.
But while a greater percentage of female students voted in 2016, voter turnout among black students fell by nearly 10 percent. The drop at historically black colleges and universities was around 20 percent.
“Things like that tell us we need to do deeper dives,” says Ms. Thomas. In the future, the institute will focus its efforts on using Nslve data to spur studies on how wealth and socioeconomic strata affect voting.
