Toward a More Perfect Union
Colleges and universities must foster civic engagement in today’s students
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In the lead up to the 2024 election, political analysts debated whether Gen Z (individuals born between 1997 and 2012, including most current college and university students) would tip the scale in a close election. From Vice President Kamala Harris’s “brat” campaign to President Donald Trump’s appearance on numerous youth-oriented podcasts, both parties spent significant time and resources trying to appeal to the newest generation of voters.
College and university campuses around the country also came alive with political action, which included a strong focus on efforts to encourage students to vote. On my home campus of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, get-out-the-vote efforts were visible and pervasive—energetic, nonpartisan, and meant to inspire engagement. Unfortunately, such efforts nationwide did not yield the desired results: just 42 percent of young voters cast a ballot this election cycle, compared to a turnout of about 50 percent in 2020, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University.
The reversal may in part reflect new laws passed in at least thirty states since the 2020 election that made it harder for eligible Americans to vote, according to research from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University of Law. Many of these laws especially affect members of Gen Z. For instance, Ohio’s 2023 House Bill 459 restricted out-of-state students from using bank statements, utility bills, or paychecks to prove residency for voting in person in Ohio. Passports, Ohio state IDs and driver’s licenses, and military, National Guard, and Veteran Affairs IDs are now the only acceptable forms of identification. Some out-of-state students could still vote in Ohio by mail, but the same law significantly shortened the amount of time to apply for and return mail-in ballots. If students opted to apply for an Ohio state ID, their home state ID would become invalid, potentially causing other problems. Other laws passed since 2020 changed when and where students could vote. This often involved shortening early-voting periods, limiting where individuals could drop off absentee ballots, eliminating on-campus voting sites, and banning drive-through and curbside voting. Students have busy schedules; any added hurdle to voting makes it less likely they will vote.
Additionally, youth sentiment about the election was tinged with an unmistakable sense of disengagement. Many younger voters expressed disappointment with political candidates, and others felt that people in power did not align with their beliefs. At the National Student Vote Summit convened by the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition after the election, participants acknowledged that the drop in student voting was partly attributable to an overall sense of disillusionment. Recent polling from CIRCLE confirmed these sentiments and verified that dissatisfaction with the candidates was a major reason some students did not vote.
As those of us in higher education continue to grapple with the implications of the 2024 election, we need to reflect on what it means to foster civic engagement in the next generation of citizens. We must consider our role in teaching democratic citizenship. As scholars of civic engagement have argued for some time, preparing our students to be informed and engaged citizens must take place continuously, not just during the lead-up to a contentious election. This is the moment to focus on how higher education can truly equip students for a lifetime of engaged democratic citizenship.
To effectively do this work, we must view the situation on campus in the wider context of the growing crisis US democracy is facing. This crisis includes pervasive misinformation and disinformation, politicization of election administration with continued assertions that the 2020 election was not legitimate, and efforts to erode the independence of the civil service system and the judiciary. Survey data collected before the 2024 election suggest that voters have real concerns about US democracy. In a New York Times/Siena College poll, less than half of respondents (49 percent) said that American democracy does a good job representing the people. Seventy-six percent said American democracy is currently under threat and that each party offers very different versions of how or why that’s the case. Similarly, a November 1, 2024, survey conducted by the Eagleton Institute of Politics, which I direct, found that most respondents worry about the future of American democracy—a worry that extends across all partisan backgrounds.
For the future health of the country, higher education must rise to the challenge of strengthening and rebuilding US democracy. My discipline of political science has been engaged in this work for some time. In Teaching Civic Engagement, a series of edited volumes published by the American Political Science Association (APSA), scholars argue that teaching our students to be democratically engaged is an extension of our mission as educators and that faculty in every discipline, as well as staff and administrators throughout every facet of the campus, should share in this responsibility. As APSA asserts, political science education has never been more important than in the current moment, and “we must teach how politics works and the importance of democratic values and civic engagement.”
Indeed, teaching democratic engagement must take place all the time and must entail fostering a campus culture for student learning and engagement. The outcome of civic engagement education must be more than what Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh refers to as “political hobbyism,” or civic work that is viewed as a pastime or is pursued primarily for personal edification. Instead, as political scientist J. Cherie Strachan has argued, institutions should promote practical civic learning opportunities like involvement with student clubs or open forums to discuss current political issues. These campus versions of civil society provide valuable chances for students to hone civic skills such as speaking publicly and coordinating collective action.
A new initiative at Rutgers University is in line with this approach. The Rutgers Democracy Lab at the Eagleton Institute of Politics will be a student-focused vehicle for putting democracy into action. The lab will provide multilayered civic learning opportunities across the university and will promote hands-on, skill-building activities and experiential learning opportunities such as crafting campuswide solutions to promote respectful discussions and dialogues and establishing campus polling locations—all geared toward empowering students to solve democracy’s most pressing problems.
The institute will have a yearly thematic focus on a specific pressing issue facing our democracy and society. A core group of students will be part of a “Think and Do Tank,” an immersive, high-impact civic learning experience in which students work alongside faculty, staff, visiting practitioners, and community partners to develop and test solutions to complex, multidisciplinary issues ranging from reforming the electoral process to ensuring access to credible information. Faculty will intentionally weave each year’s theme into coursework and university-wide programming. To ensure broad participation and access to all programming, the lab will provide stipends to compensate students for their contributions to the work and grant course credits to acknowledge learning gains. We will also recognize students’ civic learning with certificates or e-badges and provide faculty members with incentives, such as grants or course releases, to offer civic instruction.
“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” As higher education navigates teaching civic engagement after the 2024 election, these words written by the philosopher and educator John Dewey in 1916 resonate now more than ever. Now is the time to think deeply about how to transform learning and engagement in a way that gets students to the polls in 2026 and also prepares and inspires them to move US democracy toward a more perfect union.
Illustration by Juanjo Gasull
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