On February 6, 2026, the McBee Institute welcomed Jonathan Smith, Associate Professor of Economics at Georgia State University, the W.J. Usery Chair of the American Workplace, and a faculty director with the Georgia Policy Labs to deliver an educational policy seminar to McBee students and faculty. Smith’s talk presented findings from his recent study that examines how colleges influence their students’ voting behavior—both during their time on campus and after graduation.
Drawing on a rich dataset, Smith and his coauthors linked millions of SAT takers to their college enrollment records and voting histories. This approach allowed the researchers to trace how students’ civic participation evolves across different institutional environments. The results, as Smith explained during his talk, suggest that colleges play a meaningful role in shaping whether students become voters.
The study begins by documenting the differences in voting rates across colleges. Students from more selective institutions, for example, tend to vote at higher rates than those from less selective schools. However, selectivity is only part of the story. Smith emphasized that even colleges with similar profiles—comparable student bodies, missions, and resources—can produce markedly different levels of student voting rates.
After accounting for students’ backgrounds, application choices, and pre‑college voting behavior, the findings show that enrolling in a college is associated with a 10‑percentage‑point voting rate increases a student’s own likelihood of voting by about 4 percentage points—a roughly 10 percent increase. Smith explained that this effect emerges while students are in college and persists after they leave, which suggests that campus environments can have lasting impacts on students’ voting habits.
Additionally, the study found that these differences are largely driven by higher voting rate colleges’ ability to create new voters, rather than simply encouraging already‑engaged students to vote more often.
The McBee Institute is grateful to Dr. Smith’s for his insightful presentation and discussion about how campus environments, peer norms, and institutional practices can shape their students’ voting rates.