Pandemic complicates census tally in college towns, especially of new graduates
Last semester, Haley Weis was stressed. Looking back, March was a blur.
As the pandemic hit, the Bowling Green State University student was torn. She realized that it would be a waste of money to live in Ohio when she could go back home to suburban Chicago and stay rent-free. So she scoured the internet, searching for someone to sublease her off-campus room.
Meanwhile, she said, professors were overcompensating for the lack of in-person classes by bombarding students with additional readings and assignments.
But worst of all, because the 22-yearold had switched majors from biology to broadcast journalism at the end of her sophomore year, she was a year behind in securing the final internship she needed to graduate.
Weis said she didn’t yet understand the scope of the pandemic, or what the university was planning to do to adjust to it.
And the last thing on her mind was filling out the 2020 census questionnaire delivered to the house she shared with seven roommates on Main Street in downtown Bowling Green.
“There’s no question COVID has affected our efforts to make sure Bowling Green students are participating in the census and they’re registering in the proper way,” Bowling Green Mayor Michael Aspacher said. “It will have a lasting financial impact, and it’s a decadelong process.”
The coronavirus already has delivered a financial hit to college towns in Ohio and across the country because students help fuel the local economies, and they departed before the usual end of the spring semester.
A second financial hit could come if the census for those towns is incomplete, because federal funding is tied to census counts.
The majority of students who lived on campus or in off-campus, university-owned housing on April 1 were counted electronically by their schools, U.S. Census Bureau officials said in a news conference Wednesday.
But the pandemic’s effects on census reporting in Ohio college towns such as Bowling Green, Oxford and Athens pose serious complications if universities, local governments and the Census Bureau do not find a way to count students who lived off-campus last spring, especially those who have since graduated and won’t return.
In Athens, those new graduates are Mayor Steve Patterson’s chief concern.
“They received their diplomas, and now they’re gone,” he said. “In Athens, there were roughly 3,500 students (who graduated), and if I lose them all, if I don’t get them to be enumerated, it will cost me $4.2 million a year for 10 years.”
Patterson said that even if half the graduates fill out their census questionnaires, his city will still lose close to $20 million in federal funding over the next decade.
The funding, Patterson said, comes in the form of community development block grants, which allocate money to infrastructure projects in the city such as neighborhood, street and sidewalk improvements, and to school districts, senior services and job and family services.
The Census Bureau records responses from cities by separating them into reporting precincts, or census tracts. The response rates from the two mostpopulous student tracts in Athens are lower by 17 percentage points from the previous census in 2010. Only 31% of residents of one tract and 40% of those in the other have filled out their questionnaires, according to Census Bureau data.
Albert E. Fontenot Jr., an associate director for decennial census programs at the bureau, said the government has a plan to track down all college students who lived off-campus last spring before the extended Oct. 31 deadline.
“As of June 17, staff began to reach out to college administrators for students’ contact information, which will provide us with students’ local addresses and enable us to keep an accurate count,” Fontenot said.
The U.S. Department of Education has supported the bureau’s initiative, he said, and students’ data will remain confidential.
“That’s great,” Patterson said, “but the vast majority of (students) list their permanent addresses with the registrar. So, it counts for students who had already graduated as well if, by chance, they had put their local address in there.”
In Oxford, city officials are concerned that it will be increasingly difficult to locate new graduates who did not provide a local address to Miami University and could be living anywhere in the world.
“I don’t know what desire there is for someone who is not as civically minded and they’ve already graduated,” said Sam Perry, Oxford’s community development director. “(Maybe) they’re just going to blow it off if they’ve already moved away?”
Perry said the response rate in Oxford, as in many other college towns, is about 15 to 20 percentage points lower than it was at this time in 2010.
According to data from the bureau, the largest off-campus student tract in Oxford is underreporting by 69% from 2010. In that tract, 8% of the student population has filled out the census form.
“The return rate is pretty dismal,” Oxford Mayor Mike Smith said. “In the (largest) off-campus reporting precinct, they pretty much left without filling out their census.”
Total census reporting in Oxford is down 13 percentage points from 2010, to 55%, Smith said.
Although Smith is hopeful that officials will be able to target returning students in the fall and recent graduates, with Miami’s help, he’s focused first on making sure that students come back to Oxford in the fall.
“We’ve just been struggling to get through the pandemic shutdown and then the reopening; really the COVID problem has pushed everything out of the way,” he said.
In Bowling Green, the mayor has directed city officials to work directly with the state university to use email and social media campaigns to contact students who lived off-campus last spring.
“We’re blasting them with email reminders,” he said.
Haley Weis, who now lives in Austin, Texas, is fulfilling her final internship requirement by working for a local dance company as a marketing/pr intern before officially graduating in August.
She hasn’t seen an email about the census.
But Weis understands that census reporting benefits Bowling Green financially, and she believes in giving back to the community.
“I’m open to filling it out now,” she said. “Man, at the end of year normally, it’s crazy, but at the end of this year, all