‘I Count,’ But CSUN’s Census Response Says Otherwise
By: Danielle Tranter, Yasmine Cardenas & Elianne Salas
As she made her way to class just days before spring break, Mayra Lopez was approached by what she suspected to be two Census Bureau field staff. Lopez, a student at California State University, Northridge, had been directed to fill out the census, the same day she received an email about classes shifting to virtual modalities.
Without prior information from Student Housing or Associated Students, Lopez answered the questions and counted herself at her home address — not the dorm address.
That was a mistake. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, students who had returned home on April 1, Census Day, should have been counted where they had lived most of the time, dorm or apartment, had they not been displaced by COVID-19. Lopez was not the only one confused at CSUN. In the dorms, the complete count is based on a group quarters enumeration. According to CSUN’s president, the person in charge of that count thought they should not include students who had returned home. The result is that CSUN’s census tract is one of the lowest response rates in L.A. County at 3.9% as of May 10, 2020.
In a virtual Q&A with The Sundial, CSUN President Dianne F. Harrison said, “the person who responded for us… reported on having 383 residents at the time, because guess what? Everyone had moved out. If they had reported earlier in March it would have been 3000 instead of 383.”
Harrison said CSUN will now have to go back to figure out the date their residents should have been counted on — whether before or after the coronavirus moved them out of their dorms. The Census Bureau has made clear their policy on the count.
Communities like CSUN that are undercounted could affect California’s number of congressional seats and the state’s portion of $1.5 trillion in federal funding.
In contrast to CSUN’s low response rate, California State University, Fullerton has a 47.7% response rate. The high response rate could be attributed to how vocal the campus has been about the census. CSUF’s College of Communications dean Bey-Ling Sha expressed her thoughts.
“My general concern is that the importance of the census is getting drowned out in the news media but also in terms of people’s attention capacity. It’s understandable but it is unfortunate,” she said in an interview with the Orange County Register.
There had been attempts made by the CSUF campus to encourage participation in the count. Univision Program Manager of Corporate Affairs and Social Impact, Jacob Simas attended a census town hall for students at CSUF. The event’s aim was to raise awareness of the census and inform students about the importance of being counted.
However, CSUN is a much different story. In interviews and a survey including more than 15 students, over half of those living on-campus said they had seen ads about the census but did not know what it was and did not fill it out.
CSUN housing had planned to emphasize census efforts to get students counted before classes had moved online for the remainder of the spring semester.
“Our plan was to have a registration kiosk in the learning center. We also had scheduled census representatives to be at Residence Halls Association events. Our goal was to send more coordinate messages and even give out ‘I Counted’ stickers to residents that filled it out,” said Gerson Lam, Student Housing Coordinator for Residential Student Success.
Currently, CSUN has a webpage dedicated to the census that includes five short videos and a link to the census website which campus faculty has been referring students to for any further information.
Other departments on campus, such as Associated Students have taken it upon themselves to encourage census response. AS is collaborating more with student housing and student affairs to ensure students are counted this year.
Kevin Mojaradi, the AS marketing manager said AS offered to help promote it because of their extensive graphic design capabilities and social media platforms.
The campus launched various efforts after students left, but so far they have not seemed to have much effect. On April 16, CSUN’s Associated Students sent out an email to about half of the student body informing them of why they should be counted in this year’s census.
Since their initial outreach, AS has posted census related stories, such as a quiz and informational video, which educates students about the importance of their responses. Mojaradi’s email sign-off even includes the 2020 Census logo and the CSUN ‘I Count’ sticker. These outreach efforts have prompted a less than one percent increase in the response rate.
Further outreach includes an array of incentives to get students to respond in hopes of increasing campus census responses.
“We have a couple of fun contests that we want to do on social media, and we still have those darn stickers in my office so we want to give those out so we’re going to include those stickers as prizes for students who do fill out the census,” said Mojaradi. “Then we also are doing another set of emails going out once a month, until August, to promote the census as much as we can.”
The self-response deadline was extended from July 31 to Oct. 14 to accommodate foreseeable COVID-19 related issues. CSUN can still push for further participation within the campus community.
However, time is running out and many students are still unaware of the census and numbers remain low.
“I think the downfall of not getting an accurate count is bad for our community as a whole beyond the CSUN campus,” said Gerson Lam. “The census helps our community get the adequate resources for things like school, medicine, and other public services. So we are hoping everyone takes their time to fill it out.”
