College Students Volunteer More Than They Vote, Civic Report Says
This story was written by Maya Srikrishnan, Daily Texan
Today's generation of college students are becoming increasingly active in their local communities. But as their volunteer hours are growing, so is their political indifference, according to a report released Wednesday.
In the report, researchers from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found this generation, the Millennial Generation or Generation Y, to be turned off or polarized by national politics, instead engaging more at the local level than the generations before them.
"Youth have a greater tendency to shy away from politics because they're just learning politics," said Mary Dixson, associate director of the University of Texas College of Communication's Annette Strauss Institute For Civic Participation. "It's easier to ladle soup into a bowl for a homeless person than to sit down and look at the economic policies dealing with housing."
Because it takes longer to see the effects of politics, it's easy for students to get discouraged, but they need to be able to attack issues at the political level to change the roots of problems, Dixson said.
"You have fewer and fewer young people seeing voting as a civic obligation. It's not necessarily that this generation is the first one to hate politics; it's just the first one to hate politics and not participate," she said.
Dixson said she thinks the number of 18- to 25-year-old voters will increase as political issues become more relevant to their lives.
Communication studies associate professor Sharon Jarvis will present a paper next week at the National Communication Association that addresses the same issue that many young people prefer to volunteer than to vote.
Individuals are participating in nonprofit causes because they view them as disconnected from the political system, according to her paper.
"Volunteering can help a community or a cause 'today,' but volunteering without political action does little to solve a problem for 'tomorrow,'" Jarvis wrote in an e-mail.
Even if young people are volunteering in droves, the deteriorating voting rate will not guarantee a democracy, she said.
Politically active students at UT offered their own perspectives on why young people are so civically apathetic.
"It makes sense for people to think the government is so far away because with the two-party system, there aren't viable options for change," said journalism and government senior Robert McDonald, a member of the International Socialist Organization. "The two parties have been getting closer and closer together because of their mutual interests in business and giving Americans less alternatives when it comes to people-oriented issues."
Economics junior and University Democrats' spokesman Alexander Ferraro said today's political climate turns people off and that being only one vote can make a student feel insignificant in the larger political system.
"The fact is that the voter turnout in our generation is pretty poor," he said. "There is just a general tendency among younger people to mistrust the political system, but eventually as people get older they make their peace with it."
What happens in Washington, D.C., will eventually affect students, Ferraro said, using the war in Iraq as an example of an issue that cannot be solved by volunteering or giving money to charities, but that needs to be solved by lawmakers.
"They have voting at the [Flawn Academic Center], but a lot of kids who don't do it think it's not cool, per se, to be very politically minded," said government sophomore Nicholas Prelosky, vice chairman of the University chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas. "Why would you want to be political when you could be in a fraternity or play 'Guitar Hero'?&quo;
Politics can be boring, and students do not want to make the time for it anymore because a lot of them do not understand it, he said.
"A lot of people are fed up with the political system. Many people on this campus voted for Chris Bell and Kinky Friedman and campaigned for them, and when they didn't win, it was all for nothing," Prelosky said. "It stands to reason if you can volunteer, it won't make the difference passing a law will make, but someone will have a home because of you, and you can get a T-shirt to wear on your back. A lot of kids like having that physical proof that they did something."
Robert Earle, FACE AIDS president and a government senior, said it will take him three to five more years to get a degree that would allow him to do work in public policy, but volunteering in an organization like FACE AIDS allows him to help people right now.
"Our teachers are always telling us to take actions, and volunteering allows us as students to do that right now," he said. "Organizations like ourselves have been long circumventing the governmental process because the issue is so urgent that we need to reach out and do something now."
Biomedical engineering junior Leah Yngva also chose to get involved with the issues important to her locally through the Campus Environmental Center.
"I feel like I'm doing more in this organization than if I were to focus on politics," she said. "I can actually see my results, but with politics, that relationship isn't so clear."
© 2007 Daily Texan via U-WIRE