Below are two articles on the report “Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement,” a study conducted by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, in collaboration with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The study examined the barriers to political engagement that young people face.
Note that the survey reports students do not see voting as means for political change, this, I think, is actually encouraging news as it illustrates youth understand that the political system in the US is fundamentally flawed. (Also note the reported “wealth gap” in political activism.) The challenge for social educators is then how to get beyond teaching conceptions of democracy that are chained to a flawed political system and take advantage of the developing “activist” conception of civic engagement among many youth.
Inside Higher Ed: Millennials, Unspun
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/08/civic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Today’s Students Are More Civically Engaged but Are Ambivalent About Politics, Report Finds
http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/11/635n.htm
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Today’s Students Are More Civically Engaged but Are Ambivalent About Politics, Report Finds
http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/11/635n.htm
By MARY ANDOM
Young people entering college today— most of whom are part of the so-called Millennial Generation born after 1985— are neither cynical nor highly individualistic, according to a new report released on Wednesday. Compared to their predecessors, Generation X, the Millennials are more likely to volunteer and be involved in social issues, researchers found.
The report, “Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement,” is based on a study conducted by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, in collaboration with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The study examined the barriers to political engagement that young people face.
The authors of the report conducted focus groups with nearly 400 students on a dozen four-year campuses, including Bowdoin College, Kansas State University, and the University of New Mexico. They also conducted a written survey and drew on a national telephone survey.
The researchers found, among other things, that today’s students are turned off by polarized national debates, but are eager to engage on a local level.
At a panel discussion in Washington that followed the report’s release, college representatives, students, and youth civic engagement groups said the report confirmed their findings all along. Speakers said there was a disconnect between issues students cared about and ones they were active in. For instance, students were passionately concerned about the genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan or the war in Iraq, but they didn’t know what steps they could take to change what is happening.
Students who participated in the study didn’t see voting as a way to create political change. Instead, they considered volunteering in their community as more important. A University of New Mexico student told the researchers that students feel they can have a direct effect on their communities but cannot influence the government.
“Like the government is, like, really far away and something that you can’t really affect or change,” the student is quoted as saying. “But something that you can actually do in your community and see the results of might be more, like, motivating, like, for people.”
During the panel discussion, George L. Mehaffy, a vice president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a leader of the American Democracy Project, a civic-engagement initiative, said it was “time for higher education to pay attention” to its role in providing opportunities for students to become more civically engaged. The skills to do so should be taught in college, he said.
Kiran Katira, director of the University of New Mexico Service Corps, said during the discussion that universities needed to keep in mind the people who cannot afford to participate in civic engagement.
“Those involved in the political process tend to be middle-class white individuals not representative of the communities they serve,” Ms. Katira said.
One way universities and colleges can reach out to others is by creating a dialogue on their campuses that involves different ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups, she said.
Alexandria Barabin, from the Center for Progressive Leadership, a national political training institute that recruits young people from minority groups and lesbian and gay youths, agreed that certain voices were shut out of the process.
“Young people of color are interested in issues of financial aid, minimum wage, immigration, disenfranchisement based on class, and women’s issues,” said Ms. Barabin, a member of the audience. “Collectively, they want a change from the current political direction.”
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Inside Higher Ed: Millennials, Unspun
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/08/civic
Pick the stereotype that rings truest about the political engagement of today’s youth
1. They’re too busy sending Twitter updates and playing Nintendo Wii with their friends to bother participating in the political process.
2. Following the heroic example of Tracy Flick, they hurl themselves energetically into student government like the Organization Kids they are.
3. Donning Barack Obama campaign buttons, they idealistically and methodically rally around grassroots causes that bypass politics entirely.
Each statement paints a picture that’s been used, more or less, to represent the sentiments of the current generation of students. They even have a name — “millennials” — and a set of core values that supposedly encompasses a greater willingness to collaborate, learn visually and share intimate details of their lives with the public.
They also care about the world they live in. According to a report released yesterday called “Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement,” the generation currently enrolled in college fits most snugly into option (3) above. They may not support Obama per se (or even a specific presidential candidate), but they do have goals and want to improve the world. The problem is that they’re not sure whether the current political environment makes any of that possible.
The report, from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), which studies civic engagement among young people, suggests that students are tired of partisanship and “spin,” are wary of the political process in general and tend to distrust the overwhelming array of media sources that vie for their attention. The students surveyed still retain their idealism but choose to put their beliefs into action through local organizing and volunteer efforts that offer more tangible, immediate results. They stand in marked contrast to Generation X, who in a similar 1993 report (like this one, supported by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation) were portrayed as generally apathetic and unconcerned with affairs beyond their own lives.
It might not be a coincidence that today’s college students look primarily to local activism: Many came from middle and high schools with requirements for community service. “Most high schools now have community service requirements and it’s come to the point where they’ve trained you so much into it, it becomes second nature and habit to do service,” one student told a focus group.
The picture painted in the report isn’t scientific, although its authors said they made efforts to include as representative a cross section as possible in the 47 focus groups organized at 12 four-year colleges nationwide — almost 400 students in all. Still, there’s always the possibility that students attracted to such groups are a somewhat self-selected bunch interested in particular goals and involved deeply in campus causes.
Comparing survey results from the focus groups to the report’s data from a related national telephone poll of college students, for example, reveals differences in representation for certain groups. Forty percent of focus group participants identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 25 percent polled nationally; 12 percent (versus 33 percent of students in the poll) said they were Republicans. More self-identified as liberal, fewer as moderate and twice as many said they were “very liberal” than the national sample.
At the same time, African-American students were underrepresented in the focus groups (10 percent versus the 17 percent polled by phone) and there were many more who consider themselves ethnically mixed, or in the “Other” category (11 percent in the focus groups versus 3 percent).
If the representation of students raises some questions, so does the representation of the population at large: “Are these attitudes any different from those of the general public?” asked Maureen F. Curley, the president of Campus Compact, at a panel on Wednesday announcing the report’s release.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found a gap of political engagement at colleges and universities: at wealthier institutions such as Princeton University and Bowdoin College, for instance, students are exposed to more opportunities to organize rallies, pursue causes and otherwise engage in activism. Other colleges involved in the survey included Kansas State University, Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., the University of Maryland (where CIRCLE is based) and Wake Forest University.
— Andy Guess
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