Madeline Ward, a UF elementary education junior, said she will make her voice heard this November.
As a future educator, she said she feels like political decisions made now will affect her career.
“A lot of us are just curious about information in general, and so we do a lot of research because we know that these things can affect us and our future students,” the 20-year-old said.
The National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, conducted by the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University, found that a little more than 65 percent of UF College of Education students voted in the 2012 presidential election, the highest turnout of the 20 fields of study at UF.
UF had a higher voter turnout than the national average, with 61 percent at UF versus the national average of 45 percent in the 2012 election, according to a press release.
Nancy Thomas, the director of the Tufts Institute for Democracy & Higher Education, said she believes campuses need to change learning experiences so students will engage in the democratic process.
“We think voting is a big product of the culture of a campus,” Thomas said. “If voting is in the water, people will vote.”
Thomas said she sees a politically engaging culture present in the field of education. She said she believes this culture could partly explain the high participation rates of those students.
“They get the public purpose of education,” Thomas said. “Education is not just for careers. Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, they set up universities because they knew we had to have an informed, critically thinking, involved citizenry if we were going to have any kind of democracy.”
Ward said she feels the high turnout of students in the education field could be because of the special interest that future educators have in the political process.
And she wants to make sure she has her say in the November election.
“I feel like if I don’t make my voice and opinion known, I have no right to complain about things that go on,” Ward said.
