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Campus Action Guide: Student Loans

Attention Democratic Presidential campaigns and assorted grassroots youth groups. In light of recent scandals, and as part of their Debt Hits Hard campaign, Campus Progress has created a guide instructing students on how to organize for fair lending on campus:

Honest Lending, Fair Lending: A Guide to Exposing Conflicts of Interest in School Financial Aid Offices (pdf)

The guide is fairly comprehensive; it includes step by step instructions for navigating your school’s financial aid system and rooting out shady lending practices on campus, talking points on student debt, and links to related articles that could provide posts and posts worth of blog material.

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April 21st, 2007 1:32pm
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OT: What is the NYT Smoking?

Submitted by Matt Singer on Sat, 2007-04-21 13:35.

The NYT based on a single poll is reporting that young voters are more pro-war and pro-Bush than their elders. This flies in the face of basically every other poll I’ve seen.

Thoughts, Mr. Connery?

NY Times Poll

Submitted by Michael Connery on Sat, 2007-04-21 13:44.

Hey Matt,

I spent most of my free time this week looking at the IOP Spring Survey. That too had some bad questions and I think might have missed the mark on young people's views of some issues - particularly in the area of foreign policy.

But to answer your question, yeah, the NY Times poll seems to be garbage. I haven't actually read the poll - just the article they posted, but I think that Kristina Rizga, the editor of WireTaped pretty much nailed it in this piece she wrote:

Since I've read many surveys showing contrary data, I wanted to find out about the methodology of this survey. All I found was one sentence stating that "The nationwide telephone poll was conducted March 7-11 with 1,362 adults."

Who knows what number of these adults were 18- to 29-year olds. Were these respondents stratified to ensure that they accurately represent the total US population in gender, age, ethnic, and regional distribution?

Such lousy journalism contributes to nothing, but continued stereotyping of young people as an "apathetic" generation despite the fact that in the last midterm elections, young people came out to the polls in record numbers inspired by their disapproval of the current administration and its policies. Not to mention that there are countless polls that show the majority of young people continue to oppose the war in Iraq.

The poll seems to be an outlier, and since the cross tabs aren't public, there's no way to know if the methodology was flawed or if the Times overemphasized a questionable result just to chase a novel storyline. Badly done by the Times, and I'll wait until I see a few more polls echoing this sentiment before I give it any credence.