The Quad: The Youth Vote

North Carolina Democrats made a bet on young voters as the key to turning the state blue for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Democrats’ extensive ground game homed in on newly registered voters in the state, and 18 to 25 year olds made up the largest share of them. In North Carolina and elsewhere, the Harris campaign targeted student voters. The state’s Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton, said the efforts could make all the difference. 

“We put an emphasis on young voters because that’s where I think the party had lacked the emphasis,” she said in a PBS interview ahead of the election. “We know that [the] North Carolina youth vote is going to change this election cycle for us.”

But that didn’t happen.

Democrats’ plan required strong turnout among young voters and unaffiliated ones, who tend to vote at lower rates than other groups, but this year’s turnout appears to be lower than 2020.

“What is clear right now is that the youth vote was a bit off from 2020,” said Gunther Peck, a professor of history at Duke University who researches young voters in North Carolina. “What’s not clear is exactly why and where.”

One other change: Young voters in North Carolina appeared to shift toward former President Donald Trump. Some Republicans view it as an exciting prospect.

–Erin Gretzinger

What Happened to North Carolina’s Youth Vote? 

Democratic organizers hoped young people could help turn North Carolina blue. It didn’t go as planned.

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Thanks for reading The Quad, a higher education newsletter written by The Assembly’s Matt Hartman and Erin Gretzinger. Reach us with tips or ideas at highered@theassemblync.com.

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Student Voters at The Polls

What drives Gen Z student voters to the polls and their experiences there can reveal a lot. 

Here are a couple of quotes from college student voters that reflect their motivations, how their college education impacts their vote, and their enthusiasm for the democratic process.

“As a HBCU student, it’s very important to go out and share my voice by voting, because no one else will fight for me besides myself and people who look like me,” said Evan Bailey, a second year political science student at North Carolina Central University.

“I voted because of women’s rights, abortion, gerrymandering, everything,” said Amira Poindexter, a senior criminal justice major at North Carolina A&T University.

“Given the kind of narrative that we’re generally a left-leaning school, I think we’re out here making a good impact, and we love to see that,” Preston Hill, vice president of the UNC-Chapel Hill College Republicans.

“Even spending so much time on it, this is not an easy process to navigate, even when you want to navigate,” said Caprice Seeman, a senior at Duke University who helped with get out the vote efforts on her campus.

Check out more scenes from Election Day from The Assembly and our partners.

—Erin Gretzinger, P.R. Lockhart

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An Unexpected Guest

Even before the election results rolled in for the gubernatorial race in North Carolina, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s chances didn’t look too good. And his decision to crash a candidate forum at N.C. A&T likely didn’t persuade any students on the fence. 

The candidate forum, planned by N.C. A&T’s chapters of the NAACP and fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi Inc., extended an invite to Robinson, along with Attorney General Josh Stein, the Democratic candidate for governor, and the two candidates for state superintendent of public instruction. 

Robinson did not respond—until the morning of the event, when he told student organizers he was coming, whether they liked it or not. 

The Assembly’s Joe Killian has the details on the event, how student organizers reacted, and Robinson’s comments in the forum. (Probably needless to say, Robinson was not happy with how the event went. Organizers weren’t surprised by that—or when his campaign contacted them promising “repercussions, regardless of the outcome of the election.”)

What conversations are stirring on your campuses post-election? Let us know at highered@theassemblync.com.

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When You Make an Assumption…

There’s no shortage of critics about return-on-investment studies in higher ed. But often they reject the process altogether, so we were intrigued by a blog post that Clark Ross, a Davidson College economist, wrote for the Martin Center. 

Ross is a proponent of the ROI approach in general but raised a number of questions about the study the UNC System published earlier this year. 

“The problem is when you apply that to higher education, it just gets all messed up in all kinds of countless ways,” Ross told me recently.

For many technical reasons—like how to discount future earnings to present value and how to apportion overhead costs to individual students and programs—Ross doesn’t think the clean, simple number often reported as the conclusion of an ROI study is as definitive as it looks. 

It can be in specific educational decisions like an MBA, he said.

“You have some expected future earnings that you can calculate, and you have the cost of the MBA program, and the opportunity cost of lost earnings,” Ross explained. “That’s one of the things that lends itself to a pretty easy calculation.”

But universities have many more parts. Is the cost the price the student pays, even though basically every student has a different out-of-pocket cost? Do you include the amount the state and federal governments contribute through loans, grants, and scholarships? Or do you ignore all that and just go with what the university spends to educate the student? 

Similarly, how do you calculate the return? What’s the dollar amount for the decrease in crime that correlates with a more educated population? The impact of research findings (which were not included in the UNC System report)? The marketing impact of a superstar researcher?

Any answer to those questions requires making assumptions, and every assumption will bias the study one way or another. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, Ross said, but it does mean it’s not clear cut.

“I get very annoyed and disheartened when I hear economists or policy people with these ‘unambiguously correct’ statements about what we’re measuring and how we’re measuring it and how good it is and what we should do,” he said. “You just can’t think you can throw the same data into the hopper and come up with something.”

—Matt Hartman

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