Students serve but don’t vote, survey shows

By Dana Parker-McClain

College students are choosing community service over civic engagement, and the practice is costing them dearly.

The biggest problem with students’ lack of civic engagement is that the number of students that vote continues to decline, said Richard Cone, California coordinator of Campus Compact’s Raise Your Voice campaign.

Melissa Michelson, professor of political science, said that students’ lack of voting puts them in a tough situation with current political issues.

“ The state has a budget crisis, so one of the first things they do is raise student fees. They aren’t going to get a backlash because students will complain about it, but then they will not vote,” she said. “Sacramento and Washington would pay more attention to the needs and concerns of students if voting was higher.”

A 2002 survey by the Institute of Politics at Harvard found that college students are willing to engage in their communities, but not in political activities.

The IOP survey was administered to 1,200 undergraduates, and the results came through loud and clear:

Students today believe that volunteerism is one of the best ways to immediately affect their communities, yet these same students commit little if any time to political activism.

One source of the problem may lie in the hands of universities, Cone said.

He said campuses aren’t promoting political engagement: “We have done a good job with engagement through service learning, but there is not any equivalent to that in terms of activism.”

Fresno State has about 80 to 100 courses each year that use service learning as course components, said Chris Fiorentino, director of Students for Community Service at Fresno State.

Service learning is community service that is designed to accompany an academic course and provide a student with real-world experience that complements the material they study in class, Fiorentino said.

Three-fourths of the student volunteers on campus (about 3,700) are involved in classes where service learning is a requisite, while the other fourth (around 1,000) of volunteers are students who either choose to enroll in community service courses, or are community service scholarship students, Fiorentino said.

Fiorentino said students might be more willing to engage in volunteer work because they can actually see the benefits of community service, where engagement in political activities doesn’t always yield such results.

“ If you’re tutoring a child, and you see them learn their words for the week, it’s much more real than writing a letter to an elected representative, because you have no idea if the letter is ever going to have any impact,” Fiorentino said.

Campuses that have fared well in promoting service learning may face problems in promoting political activism, Cone said.

Schools could safely teach students skills that would enable them to participate in politics, he said.

“ How do you go about writing a letter to the editor? How many students know how to petition, or how you run for office? Those skills could be taught,” Cone said.

But as far as promoting activism, many difficult ethical questions arise, and schools could face backlash, Cone said.

“ Can we, as a public institution, really encourage students to be politically active?” he said.

Professor Michelson of the political science department seems to think so.

Michelson serves on the Operation Youth Vote Committee. She uses service learning as a crucial component in her classes to help enforce political activism.

Students engage in Get Out the Vote drives to increase the number of young voters, she said.

Michelson knows that these drives yield results.

She said she has seen voter-turnout documents that prove that simply speaking to someone face-to-face can get the message across that it is important to vote.

Today’s students have a lot of knowledge about issues that the older voting population may not have any experience with, Cone said.

“ There have been some important changes in society that flip the notion of who the experts are,” he said.

While Michelson chooses political activities as course components for her students, she said that students will generally become more politically aware even if they are simply engaging in community service.

“ Studies show that being a member of an organization or being involved in your community generally leads to voting. Any community involvement naturally leads to more interest in politics and more likelihood to vote,” she said.

“ By getting students out into the community where they are interacting with people besides their families and friends, they see that there are societal issues and things that they care about. It makes them think that these are real people that are affected by the government,” she said.