Student Voter Engagement Efforts Grew in 2024. Student Voting Didn’t.

Posted by Inside Higher Ed on December 3, 2024

At the National Student Vote Summit in November, attendees discussed the best ways to boost political involvement after an election that saw worse turnout than in 2020.

Nicholas Crookston, who leads campus engagement efforts for the civic engagement nonprofit Voto Latino, opened the National Student Voter Summit Thursday morning by announcing how much student voter engagement efforts grew this past election cycle. In 2024, around 900 total minority-serving institutions, historically Black colleges and universities, and community colleges celebrated civic holidays, like National Voter Education Week, which takes place in early October, he said. And 47 MSIs, rural colleges and community colleges joined the Ask Every Student initiative, pledging to ask every student on campus to engage in the democratic process.

Other attendees at the summit, held at the University of Maryland, shared specific examples of engagement from their own campuses: football players helping dozens of teammates register to vote, parades to the polls featuring live music and dancing, student podcasters interviewing local candidates.

But despite such efforts, student voting did not appear to soar to unprecedented heights, as many in the nonpartisan student voting space had hoped.

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