Seventeen million eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 25 did not vote in November of 2000 - an election decided by fewer than one million votes and, in the case of Florida, less than 1,000 votes.
In spite of voter registration drives and an increased focus on the youth vote, a recent survey by the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute found that 65 percent of young people don't think voting in the 2004 presidential race will lead to change, while 81 percent don't think politics is relevant to their lives.
Voter registration drives are important, and they can have a positive effect; but we need to broaden our focus beyond turnout and encourage young people to make conscious decisions about voting. What is the purpose of getting people to vote, when they are divorced from civic life? They will vote based on party affiliation that predates their political views.
We will only see a significant increase in the numbers of young voters if we engage them in civic life. Our goal should be to get young people to vote as part of broader engagement in civic life. We need to find ways of developing within young people the skills, values, habits and knowledge of civic life. We want young people involved, and we want them to vote based upon preferences that arise from well-developed political views.
Where do we start? College campuses provide the perfect setting for this effort. The typical campus has hundreds of student organizations and dozens of student affairs professionals who develop programs and activities. Even community colleges and two-year colleges have added residential facilities and campus-life programs. These programs should be aimed in the following directions:
Programs that teach the arts of democracy through public work. These programs use a public-work model, where students work across differences to solve public problems and create public goods with lasting community value. Students come to understand politics and democracy not as something that politicians do, but as the small, coordinated daily actions of ordinary people coming together to build and rebuild the places that anchor lives.
For example, a program called Public Achievement at the University of Minnesota's Center for Democracy pairs college students with K-12 students and teachers. Together they do public work - building a park, developing a recycling program, raising issues around racism in a neighborhood. Young people engaged in public work experience politics as relevant, achievable and fun.
Debate and dialogue across the university. Colleges and universities should refocus their campus-life programs on debates and dialogues that work on skills, habits and knowledge needed for political discourse. They could be intramural debate leagues, staged debates over public issues in social spaces like dance clubs and coffee houses, fun social debates between residential units and/or student groups, informal but structured debates after major lectures, expanded debate teams, Model UN and mock trials. College campuses should be robust environments for students to develop the skills and habits for irreverent and fun political conversations.
Transforming the residence hall into a community. Residence halls are wonderful places for students to learn about democratic community building. We pack lots of students - 90 percent of whom have never shared a room with another person - into relatively small spaces. Every year our student bodies become more racially, ethnically and sexually diverse. Residence halls are filled with disagreements, conflicts and debates as students try to pursue their interests while also building community.
The response of colleges has been to hire staff to run them as if they are hotels. Instead, we should transform the stale American residence hall into a laboratory for young people to learn to walk across difference to work with others and create healthy communities.
These are examples of ways we can use our investments in college campuses. All of these initiatives are connected by two common themes: 1) They engage young people in activities that develop the skills, habits, knowledge and values of democracy; and (2) They broaden politics to make it relevant, fun and achievable. This approach will help young people develop identities as democratic citizens - in other words, people who vote.
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