by Christi Parsons
College students of today are more engaged than were their counterparts in Generation X, but they’re ambivalent about formal politics and averse to what they see as “spin” and polarization of current discourse.
Those are findings of a new national study to be released later today by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE).
They conducted focus groups on twelve campuses around the country to determine whether and how students’ civic engaged had changed since the last comparable Kettering study 15 years ago.
In 1993, the study found that students considered politics irrelevant to their lives and saw little purposes in ever being an active part of the political system.
Today, however, students typically have a lot of experience with volunteering and feel they have an obligation to work together on social issues. Students of the Millenial Generation (born after 1985) are critical of modern politics, the new report says, but they still want to engage
Interestingly, the report suggests that the generation raised on the Internet tends to disregard much of the information available to them because they see it as polarizing and partisan. They turn to friends and family to help filter.
The study involved undergraduate students enrolled at four-year colleges and universities (but researchers note that more than half the people in that age range are not enrolled at such institutions.)