What did The Daily’s first-ever campus poll reveal about the student body? The Daily answers this question and recaps other top stories from the last week.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Edward Simon Cruz. This is The Weekly, a breakdown of our top headlines from the past week.
We’ll be doing things a little differently this time. For most of this episode, we’ll be analyzing the results from something new that The Daily has been working on.
On Wednesday, The Daily published the results of its inaugural campus poll. We conducted it about two weeks ago. We asked students about demographics, admissions, lifestyle, national politics and Northwestern issues. And I have here with me today our polling editor, Scott Hwang, to talk about the process we used to conduct the poll and some of the key findings from it.
This is the first time we’ve ever done something like this. How did the idea for it come about, and how did The Daily proceed in conducting the poll?
SCOTT HWANG: Well, thank you for having me. This has been a sort of pet project of mine for about six months now, maybe seven. I first came to Jacob, the (editor in chief), with the idea for the project over spring break, and the reason I wanted to do this — one, I have just sort of a passive interest in polling in general, but I had become curious — if you’ll remember, last year had a lot of on-campus protests involving the situation in the Middle East primarily, and what we found was that, or what my impression was, was that a lot of those protests and the op-eds — we became accustomed to hearing from the people with really strong opinions. But what that was missing, I thought, and the gap we could fill, was what the median student thought: What do most students feel about the protests themselves, about the issues? And so that’s what I sought about trying to rectify with the poll.
And originally, we had tried to plan out a poll of the incoming class of 2028, based on a lot of the precedent from other colleges. So I spoke to folks at The Brown Daily Herald, The Vanderbilt Hustler. I looked at examples that The Harvard (Crimson) did, and I think Princeton’s paper had one. And they often did a lot of first-year polls. Now, we weren’t able to make that work due to some bureaucratic reasons. But, over the summer, I was really preparing questions to make an in-person, full undergraduate campus poll happen.
To give an overview, we conducted the poll over a week. I believe it was two weeks ago. And we had it advertised on social media. We had it, you know, distributed through various email listservs, and we also had some in-person polling stations with Daily staffers and, essentially, a QR code. So that was at (the Technological Institute), at The Rock and at (Norris University Center). And we got over 1,100 responses, which I’m very happy with.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: When you were combing through the findings before we published them on Wednesday, what were some key statistics or results that were especially noteworthy to you?
SCOTT HWANG: Well, the headline result that we were all sort of looking at was how students were feeling about Schill. If you’ve picked up the paper recently or on the online version, he had a 32% approval, 34% disapproval (rating). You know, that’s pretty even. The numbers did differ by class year, but that was notable in and of itself. I think some people expected it to be higher. Some people expected it to be lower.
Some other results I was curious about — I was curious about some of the gender breakdowns for some of the questions. For example, we did ask about politics. It’s an election year. The student body as a whole is overwhelmingly liberal, Harris-voting, but there are some small differences between genders.
Also some of the smaller differences — for example, I expected, and indeed there was, a difference between genders in what percent of students had or hadn’t read a book in the last year. Women were a little more likely to have read a book, which was not surprising to me, but, you know, most students had read a book anyway, so I’m not making too much of it, but those are some of the ones that I found really interesting.
And I published this in the main story, some differences between the Early Decision admits and the Regular Decision admits among the first-years. Early Decision admits are more likely to be Asian at a statistically significant level of — at least, for those who care — alpha equals 0.1, so 10%, and the Regular Decision class is more likely to be Black and Hispanic. And the Early Decision class was less likely to be on financial aid, none of which is necessarily surprising. You can explain that in a lot of ways, and we only have the correlation. But I thought it was interesting to just see in hard numbers.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: Obviously, this isn’t a random sample, which will affect the way that we interpret the results. How representative would you say this sample was, and how accurate can we say the findings are based on that?
SCOTT HWANG: I’ll first talk about what national polls do or a lot of polls of larger populations do. They’ll often do something called reweighing, where basically, they are looking at different demographics, and if their sample doesn’t align proportionally with those demographics, they will boost some of the responses with a weight in the back end to make their sample essentially look more representative.
We didn’t do that. The reason we didn’t do that is for a few reasons. One: We didn’t actually have all the data on every demographic and their breakdown within the Northwestern population. We would have had to have used a previous year’s data set, and we’re making a lot of assumptions at that point.
Another thing is that we would have to make assumptions about what sorts of differences between students mean that lead to sort of saliently different answers. So Schill’s approval rating, for example — we don’t know necessarily that an important factor that goes into it is class year, and so to reweigh based on class year is sort of to make an arbitrary choice. And my preference was to just present the data broken down by class year instead of reweighing on the back end because I thought it was more transparent, and because we didn’t have all the data to make an accurate weight.
Now to go back to answering the original question, we had a large sample size, and so that means that if we were to have perfectly sampled the population in a random sense — that means that you can expect the numbers would be very close to the actual population numbers.
Now, our sample was certainly not random. It was what’s called a convenient sample. So we were just trying to get responses however we could. Our distribution methods — we wanted to set up around Tech and around Norris, so Tech is on North Campus, Norris is sort of to the east and The Rock is on the South Campus. So we wanted to have a geographic split. We had some departments send out emails, which will send possibly a sort of sampling bias.
But I think, most importantly, we did see in the data that we can be reasonably certain that some of our numbers were not representative of the overall population. We had oversampled Medill students. We oversampled women, I believe, as I wrote about, and we undersampled varsity athletes. These are all examples.
Now again, the question is, which of those are going to lead to salient differences in the answers and the responses? I don’t know the answer to that. That’s something that you would have to see, ideally, over multiple polls. And so, this early in the process, I decided that it was better not to do any reweighing.
But I think you can be reasonably assured, because of our large sample size and because there didn’t seem to be large swings between a lot of these populations, that our numbers are pretty close to how the population thinks.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: That was Polling Editor Scott Hwang discussing the methodology and results from The Daily Northwestern’s inaugural campus poll conducted this fall.
SCOTT HWANG: Thank you for having me.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: Here are the other top headlines from the week:
NU sued Moderna, alleging the company misused the University’s patented lipid nanoparticles to develop its Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine.
Former 5th Ward councilmember Delores Holmes died at the age of 86. She co-founded the parent support organization Family Focus and served as its director for 27 years before her time on City Council.
The independent bookstore Bookends & Beginnings began a new story in Evanston with the opening of Middles Used Books.
The Wildcats lost to the Iowa Hawkeyes on the road 40-14.
And Northwestern’s chapter of Gamma Phi Beta is set to return in January 2026.
From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Edward Simon Cruz. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Weekly. This episode was reported and produced by me and Scott Hwang.
The audio editor of The Daily Northwestern is me, Edward Simon Cruz. The digital managing editors are Carlotta Angiolillo and Sasha Draeger-Mazer. The editor in chief is Jacob Wendler.
Our theme music is “Night Owl” by Broke for Free, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License and provided by the Free Music Archive.
Follow us on X and Instagram @thedailynu. We’ll be back next Monday with another episode of The Weekly.
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— Highlights from The Daily’s Fall 2024 Campus Poll: Schill approval, voting and student sex habits
— Northwestern files lawsuit against Moderna, seeks royalties for COVID mRNA vaccine technology
— Gamma Phi Beta set to return to NU following charter suspension
