NSLVE and ADP’s Emporia State University (Kan.)

Attention ADP Campuses: The deadline to sign up for the National Study on Learning Voting and Engagement (NSLVE) is approaching quickly (Monday, April 14).  To participate and receive  free, confidential information about your student registration and voting rates, all you need to do is sign an authorization form (click here to access) and send a scanned copy to charlotte.ringle@tufts.edu.  One of our fellow ADP campuses, Emporia State University has already participated and Rob Catlett, Emporia’s ADP Campus Coordinator would like to share his experience going through this process and how his institution plans to use their report.  His email is below.

You’ll find additional information about CIRCLE’s NSLVE study in previous blog posts here and here.

 

Colleagues,

Sometimes it is challenging to participle in a study, especially when we are uncertain of the costs and benefits , both explicit and implicit.   (Is that a giveaway that I am an economist?)  The greatest cost for ESU to participate was the ten minutes it took for me to go to the dean’s office and explain what Nancy Thomas, Margaret Brower, and others at Tufts were doing with the NSLVE study.  We had no financial obligation and none is expected in the future from participating;  All it takes is completing a simple form and a signature followed by the Institutional Research (IR) office providing some data (and that may take some time depending on your IR office); NSLVE does the rest.

The benefits are significant and I wish we had this when we came back from the first national meeting of the American Democracy Project as a baseline.  At that point all we knew was that less than ten percent of ESU students were registered to vote; we had no focused data on age, major, gender, race, or the like.  We could have accomplished so much more with a report like the one we just received.

We plan to include our report in our self-study materials for HLC re-accreditation among many other things.  We look forward to future opportunities to participate in NSLVE studies because it will allow comparison with our current report as a baseline.  Seldom do we find authoritative external direct assessment-type of data related to ADP, and to find it without charge is fantastic.  Let me know if I can answer any questions.

Best regards,

Rob

Rob Catlett
Director, Centers for Economic Education and Community Research
Department of Mathematics and Economics
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Emporia State University
Emporia, KS 66801-5087