Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 43

AMERICA'S BEST
COLLEGES FOR
STUDENT VOTING
The schools doing the most
to turn students into citizens.
By Daniel Block

or decades, students have been among America's
least faithful voters. In 2014, only 20 percent of
eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds cast ballots-
a record low, and well below that year's already abysmal
national turnout rate of 37 percent. The youth turnout
rate in 2016 was 46 percent, much higher than during the
midterms, but still 15 percent less than the overall rate
and 24 percent less than turnout among people over seventy. It's therefore little wonder that both parties prioritize the issues facing older Americans over the problems
facing younger ones.
But if the most recent elections are any indication,
that is changing. More than 35 percent of people aged
eighteen to twenty-nine voted in 2018-the highest midterm turnout by young Americans ever recorded. This demographic voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, helping propel the party's many House and gubernatorial
victories. Democratic presidential aspirants are now foregrounding plans that would make college more affordable
and ease, or even erase, the $1.5 trillion in student debt
now held by Americans.
The Washington Monthly believes that colleges have
a responsibility to inspire students to be active citizens.
That's why our rankings have long rewarded schools
whose students give back to the country by participating
in the military, the Peace Corps, and other forms of national service. Last year, in the lead-up to the midterms,
we added another, first-of-its-kind set of metrics: how
well colleges encourage their students to vote. We repeated that exercise in this year's rankings.
Because it is impossible to get actual turnout rates
for most colleges, we use proxies: we measure which
schools take part (and to what degree) in the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE)

at Tufts University, which calculates registration numbers and turnout rates for participating campuses; then
we factor in participation in the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which helps schools craft plans to bolster civic engagement. We add this data to the "service"
part of our overall ranking, awarding institutions one
point for each of five metrics they fulfill. Schools that got
a perfect score are listed on the honor roll on page 44.
(The specific metrics are located at the bottom of the honor roll.)
These top performers may surprise you. While a few
are big-name private colleges, like George Washington
University and Brown University, the vast majority are
public institutions, many of them lesser-known schools
like Michigan's Ferris State University and the University of Minnesota Duluth. Indeed, some of America's most
famous schools, like the California Institute of Technology and Carleton College, earned the lowest possible score
(zero) on our college voting metrics.
It doesn't take universities all that much effort
to boost student voting. Students themselves will do
most of the work if given half a chance, even in the face
of efforts by some politicians to suppress their votes,
as I explore in "The Voting Wars Come to Campus," on
page 28. And because voting tends to be habitual-
if you vote in this election, you're far more likely to vote in
the next one, and the ones after that-colleges and universities have an opportunity to boost democratic participation not only in 2020 but for years, or even decades,
to come. We hope the example set by the institutions on
our honor roll will inspire more schools to get into the
democracy-building game.
Daniel Block is an editor at the Washington Monthly.
Washington Monthly

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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