A student at George Washington University recently asked my advice on encouraging undergraduates to fill out census forms. Her argument was students live in DC most of the year and as such would benefit from filling out the forms here rather than having their parents fill out the forms in their home states. She also argued that GW students are public service minded, and filling out the census form is a civic duty.
My advice was a bit different: ignore the students.
She should certainly encourage student leaders to encourage their constituents to fill out the forms, but those folks are both in the minority and don’t need much encouragement. The problem is reaching the vast majority who are not in student government or work at the school paper.
While completing the census may technically be public service it’s not terribly compelling. When most of us think of public service we think of building houses or delivering meals, not filling a form, no matter how important that form may be.
Those with the most to gain by increasing the population of Washington DC are not the students, most of whom will be gone by the time the data works its way into federal funding formulas. Those with the most to gain are the staff, administrators and professors at the university. They are the ones with students in public schools, who commute on local roads and ride the Metro. As such a good approach is to get faculty to encourage students to fill out the forms. Faculty often have more persuasive power than other students do (not as much power as we’d like, but power none the less). Faculty can also make a different kind of argument to a captive audience; rather than encourage students to fill out forms out of a sense of duty or for the promise of benefits they may or may not be around to see, the faculty can argue the students should fill out the forms for the benefit of the faculty member’s family. Most students have at least one professor they feel close to, whose kids they know about and whose lives they feel a part of. Filling out a census form as part of that relationship has a different persuasive appeal.
The other efforts should of course continue – competitions pitting fraternity and sorority houses against each other, working with the athletic department to pit teams against each other, handing out raffle tickets to students who prove they’ve filled out a form, using proof of filling out a form as admission to an event, and so forth. But running directly at the students only gets you so far, smoke and mirrors plus a little guilt can work a bit. But by taking the focus off the students can find a new way to reach them.
