I’ve been doing some research on college students and politics for my political action committee (and wrote up a post for our blog here)–since I don’t know enough to contribute much to the discussions about redistricting, I thought I’d share what I’ve found. Maybe this is just pointless demographic trivia, but bear with me…
The district with the most college and graduate students – by far – is Mike Capuano’s MA-08, which includes Harvard, MIT, and Tufts, to name a couple schools. College students make up 16.9% of the district; in no other district are they more than 14.3%.
The only other district with more than 100,000 college students is Jason Chaffetz’s UT-03, which is expansive enough to include both Utah State Utah Valley University and BYU. Since UT-03 has been growing so rapidly, though, it ranks only 12th in the proportion of residents who are college students.
10 of the 25 districts with the most college students (as a percentage of residents) are represented by Republicans. Chaffetz’s district is the only one among these that is totally hopeless for Democrats, although now that Chet Edwards is gone TX-17 probably falls into that category.
8 of the 10 districts with the fewest college students are represented by Republicans. Nine of those are in the Sun Belt; the district with the 10th fewest, Bill Shuster’s PA-09, is the northern district with the fewest students. Gene Green is the Democrat representing the fewest college students, and Scott DesJarlais has the very fewest college constituents.
Not surprisingly, Republicans are much more likely to represent young people than college students. They hold 8 of the 10 districts with the largest proportion of 15-24 year-olds.
I’d started this project because I was curious about the districts of a couple of candidates that my political action committee had endorsed, only to watch them lose heartbreaking races. I figured that Mary Jo Kilroy and Tom Perriello–representing OSU and UVA–would figure high on the list. But it turns out that Kilroy’s OH-15 is only 19th, while Perriello’s VA-05 is all the way down at 136th. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the dropoff in college turnout didn’t contribute to their defeats. Anecdotally, at least, I’ve heard that UVA’s turnout was terrible in 2010.
In any case: I’ll be interested to see where some of these student populations end up after redistricting, since campuses are convenient blocs of low-leverage voters who can be shuffled around districts.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that my source is the American Communities Survey, available online here: http://fastfacts.census.gov/ho…
But seeing the actual lists of districts you’re referencing would be even more pointful :).
I think with OSU, since it’s such a huge school and Columbus is split between two districts many of the students may be living in other districts.
Small correction: Chaffetz’s district doesn’t include Utah State. Logan is in UT-01.
Are these Census numbers or voter registration numbers? Many students are registered to vote in their hometown, not where they go to school. (I never changed my voter registration when I went to college.)
We’ve got Marist, Ithaca, SUNY Binghamton and SUNY New Paltz here.
Worcester has 10 colleges, although most are of the small variety. I guess this is numerical confirmation that Worcester will never be a college town.
The University of Virginia is the only sizable school in the current VA-05 so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s way down at 136th. However, there are a number of universities/colleges in the district such as Longwood, which is small but growing (around 5k overall), is in Farmville, VA, and in the district. I assume its the 2nd biggest after UVA, though it has 1/3 of UVA’s undergrads and 1/4 of its total students. UVA is not that big of a school, though, with just 13k undergrads and 6k graduate students. Obviously, that’s not small but it’s not anywhere near Ohio State or University of Texas territory in terms of total enrollment (50k+).