City managers from the cities home to several Big Ten schools met at the Lorraine H. Morton Civic Center on Friday to discuss counting college students on their respective campuses in the upcoming 2010 U.S. Census.
Representing the college towns of University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Illinois and Penn State, each city manager offered examples of how their campuses have counted students in the past and brainstormed efficient methods for the future.
‘It was just an exchange of ideas,’ said Craig Sklenar, Evanston’s general planner. ‘We talked about how to coordinate our campaigns.’
The city managers proposed ideas to promote the census such as advertising on the sides of buses, initiating an e-mail campaign and using social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter.
‘Students are much more spread out in the way they communicate,’ Evanston City Manager Wally Bobkiewicz said. ‘It’s not just about putting out a poster board in the student union and hoping everyone will see it. You have to Twitter. You have to Facebook people.’
The federal government allocates $435 billion annually to cities nationwide based on census numbers, Bobkiewicz said. Some of the funds go to Pell Grants, which are federal dollars awarded to students with financial need.
‘Some universities are telling their students to get counted because Pell Grant monies could go up,’ Bobkiewicz said.
But universities have yet to find the most effective ways to count their student bodies. Methods change from campus to campus since some universities need to accommodate larger student bodies. Bobkiewicz said the meeting was especially beneficial for cities such as Ann Arbor, Mich., which must count more than 40,000 students at Michigan.
NU administrators have talked about placing official census containers around campus where students can drop off their completed forms.
‘Other campuses around the Big Ten didn’t even know those containers existed,’ Bobkiewicz said. ‘It was really good to get that information sharing because every campus is getting a kind of different experience with the Census Bureau.’
The idea of a campus-wide competition between students to motivate them to fill out the census is still being refined, but no plans can be finalized until NU receives student input, said Lucile Krasnow, special assistant for community relations at NU.
‘I can’t even name (the competition) yet because we want students to designate what would be a great competition or a great prize,’ Krasnow said.
Bobkiewicz said the meeting gave Evanston an opportunity to incorporate new ideas into its census-collecting plans.
‘We could take the best practices from what other communities are doing,’ Bobkiewicz said. ‘It was good from our perspective to hear what other people are doing with the census staff (to count students).’
Campus officials will begin to put their plans into action soon, with the April 1 Census Day approach, Bobkiewicz said. The other city managers could not be reached for comment.
‘Every community brought different things away from the meeting,’ Bobkiewicz said. ‘We’re now going to go back to the census officials we’ve been working with to figure out the best way for us to count students on campus.’ [email protected]
