Today’s young people are socially conscious, civically engaged and dedicated to helping those less fortunate than themselves, says a study examining college students’ commitment to social activism. According to a report released by The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) members of Generation Y (or Millennials) are more civically active than their predecessors, Generation X. Generation Y, defined by CIRCLE as those who “came of age in the year 2000” were found to be more likely to engage in social activism than participants interviewed in 1993-1994.

 

The CIRCLE study conclusions, which were garnered through research at 12 U.S. college campuses, compared present findings to results of a 1993 project by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation which also examined college students’ levels of devotion to civic improvement. Research back then focused on members of Generation X, famous as the disconnected, grungy “slacker generation.” The previous study findings indicated that members of Generation X considered politics “irrelevant,” and deemed political activism to have “little purpose.”

 

What accounts for the differences between the two generations? Alexander P. Orlowski, a junior sociology/political science major at Ohio’s University of Dayton (UD) who recently completed a summer internship with CIRCLE and worked on analyzing the data for the report, cites several factors which have contributed to forming the Millennial identity.

 

“When the September 11th attacks happened in 2001, Millennials were in junior high or high school and just beginning their formation on greater worldviews. We then had an invasion into Iraq and worries of resurrecting the draft,” Orlowski explains. “Immediately, Millennials were forced to think about how these world issues could affect them in a very real way in the near future.”

 

Assistant Professor and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the School of Communication at Colorado’s University of Denver, Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D., agrees. “I think that although we experienced a brief moment of solidarity following 9/11, that broke apart rather quickly. The war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, combined with the increasing divide between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in the U.S. economy, led to increased polarization in the U.S. Young people found themselves alienated from this polarized government, and this laid the foundation for a shift to civic engagement and local initiatives,” Clark offers.

 

“There are at least three major political issues that influence young people’s daily lives, Clark explains, who describes today’s issues as having the same relevance to Millennials that desegregation and Vietnam had to young people in the 1960’s. “These issues include debates over immigration, over the Iraq war, and over gay and lesbian rights,” she contends.  

Much like the 1950s and 1960s, when high schools became ground zero for the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that led to desegregation, today’s high school and college students are witnessing politicians’ efforts to bar education for children of undocumented workers. They also see communities rallied for and against “English only” programs in their schools. Using new technologies at their disposal, such as cell phones and pagers, they can quickly organize responses to legislative attempts that restrict opportunities for their peers and their peers’ families. “That’s how high schoolers in Los Angeles and in other cities quickly organized walkouts protesting restrictive illegal immigration reform,” she notes, adding, “Students are asking, ‘Who has a right to a high school or college education?’, much as they did a few generations ago in the Civil Rights movement.”

 

Young people have also been involved in protests against the continuation of the Iraq war, in part because they have seen their peers and other members of their generation killed and injured in a war for which, in their view, adults do not provide adequate justification, Clark argues.

And Millennials are also more actively concerned with gaining equal rights for gays and lesbians than previous generations. “This is one of the earliest generations to see gay/straight alliances in their high schools and colleges,” she notes. “When politicians debate and discuss gay and lesbian rights, Generation Y has a connection to that, and a greater one than, say, labor unions [an issue of a past generation].”

With the rise of Internet music piracy and attempts to enforce the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Generation Y is also living through the first major challenge to corporate control in a generation, Clark claims. “The prosecutions of music piraters have backfired for many of the big music corporations,” Clark notes. “Young people think, ‘the big industries are making a lot of money, and the artists maybe are not.’ In seeking a justification for their own practices of pirating, they see themselves as at the forefront of a revolution in copyright that could someday reward artists and hold accountable the greed of corporations,” she says. All of this helps young people to see themselves as civically engaged, although in less traditional ways than through voting and volunteering, Clark contends.

  

Society’s needs require more than just volunteering, Clark maintains. Key problems exist because “we don’t see a commonality. We live on our own maps.”  The gap between volunteers and those they serve involve disparate life experiences and little sense of collective, shared interests. “I hope young people will come to realize that we need a partnership between those who are privileged and those who are economically disadvantaged,” Clark says.

 

The image of the dedicated activist contrasts sharply with popular media images of famous Millennials like the troubled, wealthy, controversial Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan. Has their negative publicity created a need for Millennials to promote an anti-heirhead image? “Everybody wants to be the non-Paris Hilton,” Clark responds. “It does seem that some of today’s young people are sick of the selfishness around them,” she adds.

 

Orlowski's reaction to these very visible Gen Yers? “Personally, as a Millennial, I steer clear of the whole ‘MTV/Britney/Lohan' scene. So my experience with that is severely limited. However, in my personal opinion, those individuals do not only reflect poorly on the Millennial generation, but humanity as well.”

Millennials like Orlowski have embraced the values behind the increased hours of community service which they grew up fulfilling on their educational paths; those hours weren't just requirements to check off and dismiss. “Volunteering among youth rose in the late 1990s, and early 2000s. Many students were required for graduation by their high schools to get involved in their communities,” Orlowski states. “As one student in our report said, ‘Most high schools now have community service requirements and it's come to the point where they've trained you so much into it, it becomes second nature and habit to do service.’”

Natural disasters play a role in the Millennial sense of responsibility as well. Orlowski also cites Hurricane Katrina as “a major national event where this generation could have direct impact. We saw lots of college students take time to go and volunteer. UD has sent a student delegation every break since it happened.”

Disenchantment with the current political system has fueled passion to get involved, Orlowski explains. “Volunteering became a way to get involved in the political system, as one student observed, ‘Policy and politics is this thing that's kind of hard to move, it's very easy to get fed up and just turn to volunteer work.’ Or another, ‘So obviously, this is an issue and a concern for Americans. I think community service has sort of taken the spot of politics for a lot of people.’”

While Generation Y has been groomed to view civic engagement as a duty, social, political and economic issues have highlighted its value, making volunteering more than just a requirement to list on one’s college application. “So really, throughout all of their young adult lives, I believe our generation has been forced to get involved by some of these issues and school requirements, and it has just then taken a life of its own,” Orlowski maintains. “Not to mention the fact that [civic leadership program Ohio Campus Compact] and other organizations have lately made intentional efforts to increase student involvement and service learning. Additionally, on the economic side, the threat of Social Security no longer being in place when we retire has gotten a lot of students planning for their extended futures.

With all of the violence and catastrophe which this young cohort has witnessed, combined with a government that many are “fed up” with, how do Millennials avoid becoming trapped in a cycle of hopelessness and cynicism, an accusation which members of Generation X have faced for years? “As for Gen Y escaping from becoming cynical or jaded, I think it deeply stems from their desire to get involved and make a positive change. They still view the political system as somewhat frustrating, dissatisfying, and inaccessible, but still seek ways to engage it and their communities,” Orlowski explains. “In a way, I think that Millennials realize that they need to get involved in these issues, because they are concerned about them and they realize they can affect their generation in very real ways.”