Barack Obama, who won the overwhelming support of college students, faculty members, and higher-education officials during his campaign, will be the next president of the United States. His election on Tuesday breaks a racial barrier, making the U.S. senator from Illinois the first black man to ascend to the nation’s top job.
Mr. Obama, who taught constitutional law as a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, campaigned on a platform that called for increased aid to students, a doubling of federal funds for basic research, and government grants to “successful community colleges” that train unemployed workers in emerging industries.
His election ushers in an administration in which the president, vice president, and their spouses will have unprecedented ties to higher education (see a related article).
Young voters overwhelmingly favored Mr. Obama in Tuesday's election, including in key battleground states such as North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, according to national exit polls.
Over all, 68 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 cast their ballots for the Democrat, versus 30 percent who supported John McCain. That is by far the greatest share of the youth vote that any presidential candidate has received since exit polls began reporting results by age categories, in 1976, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, at Tufts University.
Data on the proportion of youth who turned out to vote this year were expected to be released today. People ages 18 to 29 represented 18 percent of total voters Tuesday, a percentage that has remained relatively stable over the previous several presidential elections as more people of every age group have voted, according to the research group. Students have traditionally been seen as fickle supporters, often voicing enthusiasm for candidates but failing to vote in large numbers. Fewer than half of U.S. citizens ages 18 to 24 voted in the previous presidential election, while nearly three-quarters of those ages 55 and older did, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But the 47-percent rate of youth voting in 2004 was an improvement over 2000, when just 36 percent of that age group cast ballots.
The Obama campaign aggressively courted student supporters, including through online networking sites, like Facebook, and by building grass-roots support networks on campuses across the country.
In a poll of nearly 25,000 undergraduates conducted last month by CBS News, UWIRE, and The Chronicle in four battleground states, Mr. Obama enjoyed a 2-to-1 edge in support over his Republican opponent, Mr. McCain, a U.S. senator from Arizona. Seventy-eight percent of the poll respondents who were registered to vote thought that the Democrat cared about people like them, and about two-thirds said that Mr. Obama was someone they could relate to.
Mr. Obama also won the favor of many college administrators, professors, and other educators, who contributed more than $19-million to his campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. They gave the Democrat nearly 12 times as much money as they donated to Mr. McCain, the widest gulf in giving to presidential candidates by academics since at least 1992, the first presidential election for which the research center has data on donations (The Chronicle, October 24).
Policy Priorities
In the poll of students, the economy and jobs topped the list of issues the undergraduates said mattered most to them, and concerns about the nation’s fiscal health certainly will be among the top problems facing Mr. Obama when he takes office, in January. The ballooning federal deficit will make it difficult for him to secure money for many of his spending priorities, including several proposals he has touted to improve college preparation and broaden access to higher education, even with a Democratic-controlled Congress that shares many of his goals.
After Tuesday’s election, Democrats gained a substantial increase in power on Capitol Hill. Democrats won at least five U.S. Senate seats previously held by Republicans, while no Democrats lost re-election bids. The Democrats also were poised to pick up several seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (see a related article).
Among the higher-education plans Mr. Obama mentioned most often on the campaign trail is his proposal to provide a tax credit of up to $4,000 for college tuition for students who agree to perform public service. The tax break would be fully refundable, allowing people who do not owe taxes to benefit.
He has advocated simplifying the federal student-aid application process by allowing families to apply by checking a box on their tax forms. Those proposals could help frame the agenda for Mr. Obama's education secretary (see a related article).
Mr. Obama also has said he would repeal President Bush's restrictions on the use of federal funds for research on human embryonic stem cells, an issue with added salience because voters in Michigan on Tuesday adopted a measure to relax that state's limits on stem-cell research. The Michigan proposal will allow research on stem cells derived from embryos that are created for fertility-treatment purposes but are not suitable for implantation or are in excess of clinical needs and would otherwise be discarded (see a related article).
Use of Race in Admissions
Among the other higher-education issues on which Senator Obama has taken a stance is affirmative action. A measure to ban the use of racial, ethnic, and gender preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies was adopted Tuesday by voters in Nebraska, while a similar measure in Colorado was still undecided early today. The Colorado and Nebraska measures were similar to the one that Michigan voters supported two years ago.
In an interview conducted by e-mail with The Chronicle last fall, Mr. Obama argued that it remained appropriate for colleges to consider race in admissions decisions.
“We shouldn’t ignore that race continues to matter,” he wrote. “To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in the socioeconomic disparities that we often observe turns a blind eye to both our history and our experience—and relieves us of the responsibility to make things right.”
However, Mr. Obama also argued that colleges should consider other measures of applicants’ backgrounds, too, when determining who faces disadvantages in the process. Institutions, he said, should take into account “white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”
At the same time, he said, people like his daughters should be treated by admissions officers as being “pretty advantaged” because they attend excellent schools and are the children of a U.S. senator and “a very talented and accomplished woman.”
On another front, immigration, Mr. Obama has said he supports federal laws that allow undocumented immigrants to pay a fine, learn English, and “go to the back of the line” for the opportunity to become a citizen. He supports legislation, often referred to as the Dream Act, that would provide a path to permanent residency for illegal immigrants who have been enrolled in college or the military for at least two years and would allow them to be eligible for certain federal education programs.
Challenges on Higher Education
Even though college topics weren’t discussed in great detail during much of the presidential campaign, urgent higher-education challenges face Mr. Obama and other newly elected politicians.
Since voters last went to the polls to pick a president, reports by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and others have warned that the United States is slipping behind other developed countries in the proportion of people who earn degrees. Thomas Friedman's best-selling 2005 book The World Is Flat said the country needed to improve how higher education and other sectors of society fostered innovation if the United States was to remain competitive in an increasingly global economy.
At the same time, stubborn gaps, based on family income, remain in who goes to college and earns a four-year degree, and the very groups that have been underrepresented make up some of the nation’s fastest-growing demographic sectors.
