Opinion | Michigan college students are registered to vote. What happens next?

With the midterm election upon us, universities in Michigan and across the country should be asking a question that goes beyond who will win on Tuesday: How many of our students who are registered to vote will actually cast a ballot, both in this election and in the years ahead?

A woman poses in a room filled with desks and chairs — Philomena V. Mantella is president of Grand Valley State University. (Courtesy photo)

At Grand Valley State University, the numbers reveal progress, challenges to overcome and the profound opportunity to establish a lifetime of civic participation. In the 2022 midterms, 87% of our eligible students were registered to vote. Yet only 53% of those registered actually voted. Nearly 9 in 10 had cleared the first hurdle. Almost half of those registered never crossed the finish line.

The easy explanation is that young people are apathetic or disengaged from democracy. However, the data suggest a more complicated story. Students who take the initiative to register have demonstrated an intention to participate, yet something changes between that intention and casting a ballot. That gap deserves our attention.

This is not a problem unique to Grand Valley. According to Tufts University’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, 76% of eligible college students were registered for the 2022 midterms, yet only 30.6% of those students voted. That means roughly 6 in 10 registered college students did not cast a ballot. Even in the higher-profile 2024 presidential election, 76% of eligible college students were registered, but only 70% voted. Nearly 1 in 3 registered students still did not participate.

These numbers point to an important distinction: Registration is a milestone, and participation is the necessary outcome. College students may find the distance between the two can be surprisingly difficult to navigate. Students may be managing temporary addresses, unfamiliar voting procedures, class schedules, employment obligations and uncertainty about where or how to vote.

We should not confuse those barriers with indifference. We should also not assume that eliminating practical obstacles alone will solve every dimension of civic disengagement. Trust in institutions, confidence that participation matters and a sense of personal agency are also essential.

At Grand Valley, we have seen what is possible when we approach voter participation intentionally. In the 2014 midterm election, just 14.8% of our eligible students voted. By 2022, participation had climbed to 46.2%, well above the national average of 30.6%. Perhaps more telling, between the 2018 and 2022 midterms, student voting nationally declined by approximately 8.5 percentage points. At Grand Valley, it increased by approximately 11 points.

To achieve this, we did not simply ask students to register. We worked to make voting more accessible. We brought a satellite township clerk’s office into our student center, helping students navigate the practical requirements of participation. We encouraged students in classrooms to develop a plan to vote. On Election Day, we provided transportation to polling locations used by our students. Michigan’s expansion of voting access has also helped create opportunities for participation. Our progress cannot be attributed to campus practices alone.

The data also demonstrates that we are far from finished. To go further, we must understand what is concealed by averages. Our 2022 data revealed participation differences of more than 20 percentage points across racial groups and nearly 30 points across academic fields. Those differences deserve examination. We need to understand where students encounter barriers, where engagement is strongest and what approaches are effective.

We know how to approach complex student success challenges. Michigan’s universities build systems to understand attrition, support retention, degree completion and career readiness. We measure outcomes, identify barriers, design interventions and examine where progress is uneven. The opportunity to apply these same capabilities to advancing civic participation is right in front of us.

Addressing practical barriers, however, is only the first part of the work. Building a sense of agency in our democracy is the second, and arguably more important, endeavor. Universities can help students move from non-participation to registration and from registration to voting. However, the opportunity for lifetime impact is even greater. We can help students develop the mindset and durable capacities that make civic participation meaningful to them: evaluating information, considering competing perspectives, exercising independent judgment and understanding how individual actions contribute to societal outcomes.

Also critically important, this work must be rigorously nonpartisan. Our responsibility is not to tell students what to think, which candidates to support or how to vote. It is to equip them with the knowledge, judgment, confidence and practical means to make those decisions for themselves. Nonpartisanship does not limit this work, it makes it legitimate.

We can continue to treat civic participation as an optional activity, celebrating registrations while accepting the gap between intention and action, or we can recognize it as an essential dimension of an empowered education.

Beyond Election Day, universities still have opportunities to help students translate intention into participation. More importantly, our responsibility should not end when the polls close. We should examine our registration-to-voting conversion rates, identify disparities among student populations and evaluate which institutional practices made a difference. Above all, we should commit to developing the skills, confidence and sense of agency that empower students to participate fully in our democracy — not just in one election, but throughout their lives.

Opinion | Michigan college students are registered to vote. What happens next?

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