While college students have proved to be influential voters this primary cycle, Ben Adler at the Politico flags data showing that young people without a university education are highly disengaged from 2008 electoral politics:
People under 30 with some college under their belts were more than three times as likely to vote on Super Tuesday than those with no college at all, according to a February study by the nonpartisan Centre for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland.
This gap is disturbing, but not surprising. The traditional ways of encouraging young people to vote, such as registration drives, mock candidate forums, and issue discussions, work best in contexts where there are lots of young people present: such as college campuses. Campaigns and organisations concerned about youth voting consequently concentrate their finite resources there. Perhaps the best solution would be for policymakers to address the barriers that prevent young people from going to college in the first place - such as its increasingly prohibitive cost.
