The Senior Project is an independent, student-led culmination of our high school experience. After three years of academic preparation, our seniors are ready to spend the last trimester of their high school careers applying the skills and knowledge they have gained to develop a project that is insightful, academically rigorous, and professional in nature. This year, we are proud to showcase a senior from one of our neighboring campuses, BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, Aarohi G.

Week 9: Second Stages

This week, my priority continues to be wrapping up my work with civics education requirements and on-campus polling. Results and progress on this front will come next week two, as I wrap up with analysis that keeps high-schoolers and non-voting methods of participation in mind.

Civics Education

To study civics education, I chose to see if there was a correlation between states’ requirements and their average voter turnout over the timeframe of 2014 to 2024. To do this, I first compiled the data from a study by Craiutu and Ngalande titled “State Civics Requirements In 2024.” This article detailed the states that participated in each combination of civics course and test (ex. no course and no test, no course and test not required to pass, etc.)

Then, I found the average voter turnout for each state and created a heatmap showing, as a scale which combinations corresponded to the least and highest voter turnout.

On-Campus Polling

The states selected for this study appeared neither in SDVR or AVR lists, to remove possibility of impact from these legislations. As manually entering the data proved to be the only option, I began for the first three states on the list. Using the College Scorecard dataset, which contains comprehensive details on each college in the U.S., I clustered similar colleges by factors like tuition, acceptance rate, and type (private, for-profit, non-profit, etc.).

From these clusters, I paired the most similar colleges within the state, where one college was a treatment university found in the list offering on-campus polling sites, and the other is a control. Finally, I affirmed each college’s validity to belong within their own clusters by calculating their silhouette score (colorcoded indicating green as very reliable, yellow as fairly reliable, and red is unreliable).

For the next week, I’ll be tackling the second step to this analysis: comparing the number of registered voters in each college in the pair. To do this, I’ll be accessing the college’s NSLVE reports. While some are easily found online, and colleges who participate are found on a website called All In Challenge, that website often allows colleges to hide their reports from public view. So, for those that I cannot find online, I’ll be reaching out to All In representatives for the reports, as suggested on the website.

Week 10: Forward Steps

This week, I got to make major improvements to my process for studying on-campus polling sites that will help me wrap up this stage.

As we discussed last week, my two main sources for this section of the project were Voter Friendly Campus and College Scorecard. The first offers a list of the voter-friendly campuses per state that offer a polling site in two-school-year intervals. The states I chose, which never had Same Day or Automatic Voter Registration, were Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina. College Scorecard offers comprehensive information on each U.S. college, which I used to determine the most similar pairs of control and treatment colleges.

Now, I increased the number of parameters used to judge whether two colleges were similar, now being able to determine the size of colleges (to avoid comparing very big colleges to small ones) and separate community colleges from 4-year institutions.

When making the new pairs, I included both of their individual silhoutte scores (determining how well they belonged in their own college groups) and their match distance (how closely the two colleges were related to each other). This two-method approach ensures I picked the best pairs. From there, I chose the best from each state.

Now the challenge was one that I had discussed last week, finding the voter registration counts within each college. It’s the best way to see real effects of polling sites. To do this, I was searching the internet for each college’s NSLVE reports, where they disclose information like this.

And while a lot of these pairs can’t be counted because their information isn’t online, the ones that can will be the specific case studies I’ll focus on in my final analysis. It seems like an inevitable limitation of studying on-campus polling sites.

So while finding the data for this wasn’t as straightforward as some other variables I studied, I’m glad I can still move forward.

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