Water pollution in Vermont’s lakes, rivers, and streams has troubled David L. Deen for years. But before the longtime state lawmaker could propose one potential solution, a public utility to treat storm water, he needed to know more about similar projects elsewhere and their financing.
The challenge: 180 members of Vermont’s legislature share just one in-house researcher. So when Dartmouth College contacted Mr. Deen, a Democrat, last fall to ask if he had any research projects students could help with, he said yes.
In the past several years, Dartmouth undergraduates have written more than 100 nonpartisan policy briefs for state legislators, agencies, and local municipalities in New Hampshire and Vermont. Small-town traffic congestion, charter schools, broadband Internet access, drug courts, and the privatization of parks, hospitals, and prisons: All have been investigated by students from Dartmouth’s Policy Research Shop.
The approach has proved a timely symbiosis for busy part-time lawmakers and college students hungry for practical experience. As more colleges look to expand research opportunities for undergraduates, Dartmouth’s shop offers one model for linking learning with public service.
The College of New Jersey is among a few institutions now looking to adapt Dartmouth’s program on their own campuses. “Involving undergraduate students both in research that matters and in practical questions of governance—both of those things are so crucial for the students’ development,” says Daniel C. Bowen, an assistant professor of political science at New Jersey. “Then there’s this public payoff.”
The University of Vermont runs a similar program, the Vermont Legislative Research Service, which has been providing state officials with students’ policy briefs since 1998. It’s not known how many other colleges run such operations for undergraduates, but the approach doesn’t appear to be widespread.
Ronald G. Shaiko, a research associate professor of government at Dartmouth who directs the policy shop, wants more colleges to try the model. For the past year, Mr. Shaiko, who is also associate director of Dartmouth’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, has been on the conference circuit, trying to sell the idea to faculty. He’s gotten mixed results. Many professors, he thinks—particularly those in tenure-track positions—are wary of the time commitment this kind of clinical teaching requires.
Undergraduates need to be challenged in new and creative ways to be prepared for the world beyond college, Mr. Shaiko argues. This kind of research provides that opportunity.
False Start, Then Success
Dartmouth’s Policy Research Shop began, modestly, in 2005, with a brief on Medicaid in New Hampshire and Vermont. It was a false start, Mr. Shaiko says now. Students had picked a topic that interested them, but nobody read the brief, which was long and unwieldy, with no specific client in mind.
Lawmakers weren’t sure what to make of the new venture.
“They were treating us as Jimmy and Jane coming to Concord on a fourth-grade school trip, patting us on the head,” Mr. Shaiko recalls. There was also a sense of “Here comes Dartmouth to solve all our problems.”
Gradually the program took shape, as Mr. Shaiko developed new public-policy courses and cultivated relationships with lawmakers and agencies to understand what issues they were grappling with. In time, requests for research came unsolicited; Mr. Shaiko also reaches out to legislative committees and local officials to maintain a full docket of projects throughout the year.
Three years ago, the research shop shifted into high gear with a three-year, $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, recently extended through 2014. Some of the funds, Mr. Shaiko says, are allocated for outreach to other colleges.
Students who want to get involved with the policy shop are first required to complete courses on statistical and research methods. After that, they work in small teams, often for several months at a time, under the guidance of Mr. Shaiko and three other faculty members, on nonpartisan analyses of policy issues that state and local officials are considering. Most of the students are pursuing a minor in public policy (there is no major).
Writing tersely worded policy briefs is a welcome antidote to long-winded academic papers, students say. Based on those final reports, most develop presentations and rehearse them at length with faculty and classmates. Then they’re ready to share their findings live with state and local officials.
On a Friday morning last month, Richard D’Amato and Mike Sanchez, both wrapping up their senior year at Dartmouth, drove to New Hampshire’s capital, Concord, to present their most recent findings on the “siting” of energy facilities. Their audience was the senior staff of the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, there to hear the students’ analysis of plans, permits, and construction of energy facilities in several other states.
On the way back to Hanover, where the two students would graduate that weekend, they reflected on more than two years of public-policy research. In that time, they’ve written briefs on refugee resettlement, long-term care, the needs of low-income citizens, and what to do with a packed, 115-year-old correctional facility in Grafton County, also home to Dartmouth.
“A lot of college involves sitting in a classroom learning concepts, learning theories, but not a lot of opportunity to go out and apply what you know to the real world. You save that for a job,” says Mr. D’Amato, who majored in economics with a double minor in public policy and international studies.
The Policy Research Shop has been not only eye-opening but gratifying, he says. “It always surprises me how much the people we present to really appreciate our research.”
When Mr. Sanchez, an economics major and government minor, first went to Dartmouth, he wasn’t interested in public policy. But he quickly became fascinated with the patterns that emerged in his research. “The states are in such similar situations,” he says, “and don’t realize they’re facing the same problems.”
Research Payoffs
Undergraduate research used to be limited primarily to the sciences. But in the past decade, it has moved beyond the laboratory and into all disciplines, says Elizabeth L. Ambos, executive officer of the Council on Undergraduate Research. Last year, for instance, the number of the council’s members from the arts and humanities grew by 35 percent, she said.
The National Survey of Student Engagement considers undergraduate research a “high-impact practice,” one that promotes deep learning and personal growth. The survey found in 2012 that one in five seniors had done research with faculty.
In New Jersey, Mr. Bowen sees plenty of opportunities for students to dive in: perhaps with the research arms of state agencies, or with local chambers of commerce working on development policies. When the state Legislature, a full-time operation, doesn’t have any pressing research needs, he says, the students would still have interested clients.
As for the Vermont lawmaker’s quest to clean up waterways, the Dartmouth students’ research is prompting broader consideration of a public utility.
In January three students presented findings to Mr. Deen and the Vermont House Committee on Fish, Wildlife and Water Resources. Their 26-page report was a case study of jurisdictions in six states that have or plan to create storm-water utility systems.
Impressed by the research, Mr. Deen says, the committee turned to the state’s natural-resources agency for guidance on how such a utility might be established in Vermont.
When the next legislative session begins, in January, lawmakers will use the students’ findings to write new legislation.
