Future Majority

Bumped. --Mike

Ever wondered why young people, despite being the “Future Majority”, aren’t really asked to help imagine and build the future they’ll inherit? I’ve thought about it a lot and it’s unacceptable. That’s why I started Young People First last December. YPF is all about building systems and tools that help young people become a more future-oriented, powerful constituency. We want to push the debate out past the next election, toward what kind of world we’ll inhabit when we’re our parents’ age.

To this end, YPF is building the Future Preparedness Index. The FPI measures how well America is moving toward the type of country we need to be in 25 years. A number of great organizations, like Mobilize.org, Black Youth Vote, Roosevelt Institution, and Student Association for Voter Empowerment (a full list of partners is below), are already helping us build this tool.

Now we need your help. Let us know what issues you think are most important from a Future Preparedness perspective. Your input is important for helping us build the Future Preparedness Index into something that will help our politics address our country’s most difficult problems. Here’s the questionnaire: http://www.youngpeoplefirst.org.

Future Preparedness Index partners: Mobilize.org, Roosevelt Institution, Student Association for Voter Empowerment, Black Youth Vote, CIRCLE, Generation Engage, Concord Coalition, Youth Entitlements Summit, National Conference on Citizenship, HeadCount, Truman National Security Project, and Sierra Club.

In an article published Thursday, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) survey, "The American Teacher," which found that a majority of today's faculty place an emphasis on becoming a change agent when teaching college students as opposed to teaching them the classic works of Western civilization.

The UCLA education professor who directs the institute believes the results point to a burgeoning gap in higher education between the abstract and the practical.

Sylvia Hurtado, a professor of education at UCLA who directs the research institute, said the gap between those who value teaching Western civilization and those who value teaching students to be social activists reflects a shift in emphasis from the abstract to the practical. "The notion of a liberal education as a set of essential intellectual skills is in transition," she says. "It's also about social and personal responsibility, thinking about one's role in society, and creating change."

Across the board, more faculty admitted to paying attention to the liberal arts while teaching.

The survey found other evidence that professors are increasingly interested in helping students develop morals and in helping them get a well-rounded education and form a commitment to their communities. In particular, 72.8 percent of professors think it is important to instill in students an appreciation for the liberal arts—nearly 15 percentage points more than said so three years ago. About 56 percent say it is important to instill an appreciation for community service—a nearly 20 percentage-point increase—and 71.8 percent say it is important to enhance students' "self understanding." About 70 percent say it is important to help students develop "moral character," 13 percentage points more than said so three years earlier.

Those are pretty big jumps for three years in between surveys. I would undoubtedly think that the success of Obama's change-based campaign and the high interest in the presidential election has something to do with these numbers.

Others argue that faculty are beginning to pay increased attention to the non-classroom side of the student, as incidents like the Virginia Tech shootings of April 2007 and others involving campus violence have occurred.

Whatever the cause, I'm encouraged by these findings, and I'm hopeful that the kind of education seen here -- multidisciplinary, focused on empowerment and citizenship -- continues to grow in the future.

An ostensibly unrelated commentary piece by a Middlebury College economics professor (subscription req. - sorry!), also published in The Chronicle this week, argued that economics at a liberal arts college is the best major for college graduates to have in a depressed job market following graduation, and as a result, it's popularity is surging.

Like many liberal-arts institutions, Middlebury College, where I teach, has a problem: Too many students want to be economics majors. Economics enrollments keep growing, and adding more faculty members to the department seems to only increase the demand. The rumor on the campus is that if the college actually provided enough professors to meet the demand for economics courses, it would have to change its name to the Middlebury School of Economics.

Professors at other liberal-arts colleges confirm that the phenomenon is widespread and has been for some time.

[...]

Companies like to hire economics majors from liberal-arts colleges not because the students have been trained in business, but because they have a solid background in the liberal arts. What I hear from businesspeople is that they don't care what a job candidate has majored in. They want students who can think, communicate orally, write, and solve problems, and who are comfortable with quantitative analysis. They do not expect colleges to provide students with specific training in business skills.

If the economics major's popularity is not due to its intellectual dynamism or connection to business, to what is it due? I suspect a mundane explanation: It is the "just right" major. By "just right" I mean that the economics major provides the appropriate middle ground of skill preparation, analytic rigor, and intellectual excitement that students look for in a major, and that employers look for when hiring students.

Both of these stories are interesting to me because of the "intellectual pragmatism" link involved in both. In one, students are in the classroom developing practical skills, learning to engage the government through their citizenship in order to create positive change. In the other, students are in the classroom, many already possessing these practical quantitative skills, seeking the liberal arts approach to economics and business, adding intellectual heft by learning to write and think creatively.

I'm in the middle of writing another post discussing the increasing number of recent college grads majoring in environmental studies who have gone on to work in institutions (especially higher education). These young professionals advise administration officials on sustainability practice -- more intellectual pragmatism.

And finally, I'd be willing to go out on a limb and argue that the intellectual pragmatism Barack Obama flaunted on the way to the White House wasn't too poorly received by Millennials.

Any feedback? If you share my opinion that we're seeing an appreciation for this melding of intellect and practice among Millennials, how might this help us to continue developing a future majority?

On the Op-Ed page today, the New York Times is running a surprisingly information-free look back at "what went wrong" with the Clinton campaign. How bad is it? Apparently, Clinton lost because she is too much like Hermione Granger. Seriously. How bad is it? So bad that Mark Penn and Michael Kinsley offer the best of slim pickings. There was one bright light though.

Buried in the 10th paragraph of an 11 graph piece (the most column inches of any contributor), in which he argues that it's not his fault, Mark Penn says this:

Are there a lot of other things the campaign could have done differently? Of course. We should have taken on Mr. Obama more directly and much earlier, and we needed a different kind of operation to win caucuses and to retain the support of superdelegates. From more aggressively courting young people earlier to mobilizing the full power of women, there are things that could have been done differently.

Emphasis is mine. This is a far cry from Mark Penn at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner:

At least two of Hillary Clinton’s upper-echelon advisers, Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn, were decidedly unimpressed .

“Our people look like caucus-goers,” Grunwald said, “and his people look like they are 18. Penn said they look like Facebook.”

Penn added, “Only a few of their people look like they could vote in any state.”

While the importance of young voters as a Democratic constituency is far from the only lesson to be gleaned from this primary campaign, it is an important one. Young Voters in Iowa were subjected to major outreach from the Obama campaign and from outside partisan and nonpartisan organizations including (but not limited to) the Young Voter PAC, Rock the Vote, the Young Democrats, and the Student PIRGs. As a result, they overperformed their share of the electorate and came out in equal numbers to the "reliable" senior demographic. That was the beginning of the end for Clinton.

Here's to hoping that other Democratic candidates down the ballot learn that lesson. And here's to hoping that they know that there are many resources available to their campaigns to help learn how to reach that audience. From live-blogging here at Future Majority, to working with organizations like Young Voter PAC and Rock the Vote, or local youth orgs that may be organizing in their state. Reaching young voters is not rocket science, and there are many folks willing to help you do it.

I have to run to North Jersey for a birthday, but I wanted to quickly point to two articles, which paint a depressing picture of the possibilities of politics as a profession as well as the reasons why some political groups excel while others fail.

First, there's an article in the latest issue of In These Times called When College Ends, So Does Activism: Why selling out is a depressingly rational choice for many graduates. Here's a bit from the article:

Because of the growing cost of college, these tiring, low-paying gigs or unpaid internships are increasingly inadequate options for left-leaning graduates. With state and federal legislators redirecting funds away from universities, college tuition has outpaced family income for the past 15 years and inflation for the past 30 years.

The burden of payment has also been shifted to the students. Loans have replaced interest-free grants as the most common form of recompense, resulting in a system whereby the average student today, according to the Center for American Progress, graduates with debt almost three and a half times that of graduates just 10 years ago. “The typical student is leaving with about $19,000 dollars in student loan debt,” says Tamara Draut, author of Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead. “And that is going to create a financial pinch when they get their first job.”

Health care is another concern. A 2006 Commonwealth Fund study found that since 2000, 2.5 million people between the age of 19 and 29 lost healthcare coverage, bringing the grand total of uninsured 20-somethings to 14 million. Among the lucky few who can pay for and get through college, 40 percent will lose their familial coverage after graduation, with under-funded organizations unlikely to pick up the costs of employer-based healthcare.

These financial burdens disproportionately affect students of color and those from less secure economic backgrounds, whose need for job stability is generally more pressing than that of their classmates. “It’s always been hard to attract class diversity in the progressive movement. It’s largely been dominated by people who have family backgrounds that enable them, for whatever reason, to take a lower salary, particularly if they are just starting out,” says Draut. “I think the problem is that now it’s become even more challenging.” All of these factors lead even the most socially conscious graduates away from progressive politics toward less-fulfilling career fields.

This is precisely the position I find myself in, as do many/most of the people who I know who want to work in politics as a career. It seems almost completely undoable for those of us without trust funds and health care.

The next article reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks back with a girl who comes from a very wealthy background. I was talking about how I don't know if I can stay in politics because I cannot risk being without health care again. Her response was "Oh, I could never go without healthcare". Well, duh, for some of us it isn't a choice.

Anyway, the other article focuses on the group Generation Engage, whom I don't really know much about, but which is run by the kids of a few well-to-do politicos, and which surprise, surprise, has no problems getting funded or getting other politicians to work with them.

The discussion between Gore in his Nashville, Tenn., home and youth groups in New York, California and North Carolina was arranged by Generation Engage, a nonprofit group trying to get more young people involved in politics. It was founded by Talbott and his brother Devin, sons of Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott, as well as Justin Rockefeller, son of Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.).

...

But bringing young people into the corridors of power is only part of the equation for Talbott. Equally important are the monthly "ambassadors meetings" with young adults that the group sponsors in all of its locations.

"We can't just be a roadshow, or it won't work," Talbott said.

Generation Engage has an annual operating budget of just more than $1 million, a full-time staff of nine and offices in the Washington area, New York, Virginia and North Carolina.

The rapid growth of the organization, founded after the 2004 elections, has opened it up to criticism that the founders' family ties helped its rapid rise. But Rockefeller says, "I don't play the 'son-of-Jay' card."

Talbott acknowledged that when they first started, they were treated "like a couple of kids trying to get attention," but he said that now "the model is working on its own."

I don't want this to seem like I'm criticizing Generation Engage for what they are doing, because from what I can tell it seems like a good organization. But saying "I don't play the son of Jay--who just happens to be from one of the richest families in the nation and, oh yeah, a Senetor--card" strikes me as pretty silly. Of course you play the son-of-Jay card, because you are the son-of-Jay card. I don't know if that's good or bad, on the whole, but I do know that the fact that only well-to-do and well-connected politicos are making it in this "movement" is a big problem