March 4, 2008

Latest Research Reveals Huge Disparities Among Young Voters

Posted by Karlo Barrios Marcelo at 12:57PM

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College students are voting in record numbers and making their issues heard in the 2008 primary season. Young people without college experience -- who constitute close to half of the 18- to 29-year-old electorate and are more likely to be youth of color -- are notably absent.

If social science research can be sure about anything, it's the fact that education is positively correlated with many civic engagement outcomes -- including voter turnout rates. In the 2004 presidential election, 27 percentage points separated the turnout rates of the college-educated (61 percent) and youth who have no college experience (32 percent). This gap has persisted since 1972 and it continues today. New CIRCLE research found that one in four young people with at least some college experience voted in the 2008 Super Tuesday states, compared to just one in 14 non-college youth.

For the health of our democracy, it is critical that all citizens make their interests and concerns known to elected officials. When youth without college education don't vote, their interests get ignored by government, which in turn, provides inadequate resources to their schools and communities perpetuating the cycle of non-participation.

We need to address this gap now -- during this election -- and while the emphasis on the internet and online organizing is effective this year in delivering information about the voting process to college youth, it leaves out non-college youth, whose voices need the most amplification. Complicating outreach tactics even more, places that were once venues for mobilizing non-college youth, such as unions, and community organizations, are less effective today because of declining membership rates.

One way to engage non-college youth, in the long term, is to improve access to and affordability of college; but not everyone wants to attend. For those young people that do not want to attend college -- or can't afford or access it -- the focus needs to turn to high school civic education. A new CIRCLE working paper found that students in higher-income school districts are twice as likely as those from average-income districts to learn how laws are made and how Congress works. More than that, they are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to report having political debates and panel discussions.

Political campaigns know that getting votes from harder-to-reach, non-college youth is more costly, in both time and money, compared to reaching out to college-educated voters. So while politicians and today's presidential candidates need to find new ways to reach out directly to non-college youth, so do young, college-educated voters, who can leverage their growing voting power to give a platform to the issues and voices of non-college youth.

A successful democracy isn't just about voting; it also requires the full participation of all of its citizens in every aspect of civil society. And sometimes participation means standing up for those Millennials that don't have the ear of political candidates.