Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 60

AMERICA'S BEST
COLLEGES FOR
STUDENT VOTING
The schools doing the most to turn students into citizens.
By Rob Wolfe
I
t has long been conventional wisdom that young people
don't vote. Compared to older groups of voters,
that is true. But it is far less true than it used to be.
More than half of 18- to 24-year-olds cast ballots in 2020,
a threshold that had not been reached since 18-year-olds
were first allowed to vote in 1971. It was a 12 percent increase
over that age bracket's turnout in 2016-one of the
largest of any age group.
Of course, 2020 was a presidential year, when turnout
generally rises across the board. Is there any reason to think
young people will show up for this November's midterms?
Actually, there is. In 2018, turnout among 18- to 29-yearolds
jumped to 36 percent from 20 percent four years earlier.
That, too, was the largest increase in any age cohort.
With Donald Trump now out of office and Joe Biden's
poll numbers in the toilet, you would expect that young people,
who overwhelmingly lean left, might lack motivation.
And that might turn out to be the case this fall. But a Harvard
Kennedy School poll in late April found that " 18-to29-year-olds
are on track to match 2018's record-breaking
youth turnout in a midterm election this November. " And
that was before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Although the recent burst of youth voting stems from
larger forces-the mobilizing power of social media, progressive
backlash to white nationalism-part of the credit
goes to the work of student voting organizers, who mobilized
young Americans to register and cast ballots despite
the pandemic and restrictive voting laws. This includes
small, student-led groups that work to get their peers to the
polls, as well as national organizations like the ALL IN Campus
Democracy Challenge, which helps colleges develop registration
and turnout plans.
One of the difficulties these groups traditionally face,
however, is getting cooperation from college administrators,
who typically don't consider improving voting turn60
September/October 2022
out systems on their campuses to be part of their jobs (even
though the founding mission statements of many of these
universities include educating students to be active members
of a democracy). All university presidents, though, are
concerned about how their schools fare on college rankings.
So, to give them an incentive to care about student voting,
the Washington Monthly in 2018 began adding measures of
student voting to our annual college rankings.
One such measure is a survey by Tufts University researchers
that tracks college student voter data: turnout,
registration rates. Another way to judge colleges' civic commitment
is through reports that administrators submit
about their efforts to promote voter participation. Then, beginning
in 2019, we used that data to create an honor roll of
colleges that submitted those reports every year and made
them available for the public to read.
This year's honor roll includes some conventionally
prestigious schools-Harvard, Princeton-but other U.S.
News & World Report heavyweights, such as Columbia University
in New York, are missing. Meanwhile, the list is replete
with colleges unheralded outside their states and regions,
like Weber State University in Utah and the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This kind of diversity is evident
throughout the honor roll, with 144 public institutions, 36
community colleges (up from 18 last year), and five historically
Black colleges and universities (up from three). If
schools like Northern Illinois University (west of Chicago)
and Pellissippi State Community College (in Knoxville, Tennessee)
can expend the time and energy necessary to make
the list, you have to wonder why Stanford, Dartmouth, and
Cornell haven't bothered.
To make the student voting honor roll, universities
had to submit 2020 and 2022 action plans to the ALL IN
Campus Democracy Challenge. Schools also needed to have
signed up to receive data from the National Study of Learn
Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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