How will these 2025 priorities generate new knowledge for the movement for 100% student voter participation?
Diving into the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition's ambitious 2025 agenda.
As the largest nonpartisan network in the US dedicated to college student voter engagement, the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition’s annual goals provide valuable insight into the needs and strategic direction of the movement for 100% student voter participation.
Each year, the SLSV Coalition begins the process of creating an agenda at the National Student Vote Summit, an annual gathering held every November following Election Day. Last fall 330 students, campus staff, administrators, faculty members, nonprofit professionals and philanthropic leaders gathered at the University of Maryland, College Park, for NSVS 2024. On the Summit’s final day, many of the attendees took part in an interactive goal-setting discussion and activity, generating feedback and ideas that formed the basis of the SLSV Coalition’s 2025 agenda.
Now distilled to 18 specific goals, SLSV’s 2025 agenda carries the theme, “Democracy Doesn’t Stop,” as a nod to the hundreds of significant elections taking place at the state and local levels in 2025, as well as the tenuous state of democratic institutions in American public life. This backdrop colors all of SLSV’s goals, including the five that the Student Vote Research Network will track most closely over the year to come:
1. Supporting the development of 100 nonpartisan democratic engagement action plans ahead of this year’s early deadline for the 2026 election cycle.
“By December 15, 2025, the SLSV Coalition’s Action Plan Working group will collaborate to help at least 100 colleges and universities develop and submit their nonpartisan democratic engagement action plans by the ALL IN Challenge’s early submission deadline ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, with a special emphasis on engaging community colleges, minority-serving institutions, HBCUs, and rural-serving institutions.”
Campuses submitted more - and better - nonpartisan democratic engagement action plans for the 2024 election cycle than they ever had before. As we continue to analyze the makeup and quality of that cohort of action plans, gaining quick traction for the 2026 cycle will be crucial for sustaining momentum gained from increased engagement and participation during the just-concluded presidential election, as well as for deepening our understanding of the impact of early submissions compared to later ones. This goal’s emphasis on campuses with different student population makeups and contexts could also help facilitate learning about how fallout from the 2024 presidential election and subsequent attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion will impact nonpartisan democratic engagement at a variety of institution types.
2. Conducting a landscape analysis of paid student fellowships.
“…[The SLSV team] will assess the current landscape of paid student fellowships for nonpartisan student voter engagement, and… develop a set of standards or recommendations that reflect equitable pay, recommended training and management practices, and suggested elements of leadership development.”
For those with access to the necessary funding, paying students to engage in nonpartisan democratic engagement work is a core strategy to attract qualified and motivated students to the work. However, to date there has not been a comprehensive effort to develop specific, unified standards for these positions. By identifying certain benchmarks that ensure fellowships offer fair wages and help position students to achieve future career goals, the SLSV Coalition can help campus and nonprofit partners better determine the feasibility of pursuing this strategy while bridging the gap between nonpartisan student voter engagement work and the career aspirations for which the vast majority of students pursue postsecondary education.
3. Compiling a centralized resource to share campus success stories.
“...the SLSV team will create a centralized resource where partners can access stories of campus-level successes in nonpartisan student voter engagement. The resource will include a keyword search function that enables other campuses to find examples based on the strategies employed and /or problems addressed in each success story so that other campus partners facing similar challenges can easily find relevant examples.”
At the 2024 National Student Vote Summit, campus partners expressed a desire for facilitated knowledge sharing and a corresponding, easily accessible resource through which they could find stories of successful nonpartisan student voter engagement strategies that could potentially be instructive for dealing with challenges at their own institutions. To fulfill this goal, the SLSV Coalition will devote significant time to tracking down specific success stories and sharing them in an informative and easily digestible way.
In addition to the obvious strategic advantages of such a resource, it could prove to be a rich text for future research, as quantitative analysis of said successful strategies would help future practitioners zero in on their advantages and applications, and possibly unlock ways to evolve and iterate on the strategies that will push us further toward 100% student voter participation.
4. Supporting campuses in implementing Ask Every Student strategies and working with select campuses to update Ask Every Student resources.
“...60 campus partners will report which Ask Every Student voter registration strategies they’re currently integrating on their campus… [and] at least 40-50 Ask Every Student campuses will report the number of voter registrations they attained through implementing AES strategies.”
“we will work with 4-7 campus leaders as Ask Every Student Codesigner who will revisit existing AES resources to update guidance and examples for campuses building out their own AES strategies.”
The Ask Every Student initiative, a national, nonpartisan, joint initiative that supports higher education institutions in implementing, institutionalizing, and scaling strategies to help campuses ask every student to participate in the democratic process, has been facilitating innovative nonpartisan voter engagement strategies on hundreds of campuses since 2020. AES’ growth in recent years has been accompanied by efforts to learn what specific strategies campuses pursue and to what effect. The SLSV Coalition’s 2025 goals aim to retrieve a rich data set from AES campuses that could lead to insights into how, when, and how well campuses implement voter registration strategies for their student populations.
The second part of this goal, which aims to revamp existing resources to fit present-day needs and context, will provide an interesting snapshot of the evolution of the nonpartisan student voter engagement space in the past five years, according to the experiences of seasoned practitioners selected for the AES Codesigner Cohort, a diverse group of faculty and campus staff leaders from across the country who collaboratively design innovative tools and resources for campuses to use to implement AES strategies. What new needs have emerged that require a different approach to student voter participation? Where are resources currently being wasted or used inefficiently? The codesigner cohort may lead us to substantive answers to each of these questions.
5. Conducting research to better understand student burnout.
“[The SLSV Coalition} will identify a researcher to work with various types of higher education institutions including community colleges, HBCUs, Minority-Serving Institutions, rural-serving institutions, and large public four-year institutions to study and further identify why students are feeling burned out or disengaging from voting specifically and to identify strategies to combat these feelings. The results and recommendations from this study will be unveiled at the 2025 National Student Vote Summit.”
Student burnout has been a question dogging the higher education space since 2020, and its effects on student voter participation are difficult to quantify, yet palpable to most higher education professionals and experienced student vote practitioners. This obviously presents challenges to a space that asks leaders to exert effort and engage with their democracy - which were never easy tasks to fulfill in the first place. Understanding how to address burnout, its root causes, and how better to engage with populations experiencing burnout could be a hidden key to inspiring action among today’s cohort of college students.
The Upshot: 2025 is the most unpredictable year yet for the nonpartisan student voter engagement space.
The SLSV Coalition’s priorities for 2025 paint an overall picture of a movement approaching the year from a place of strength, but they do so with the understanding that much is still unknown about how new government measures will continue to reshape the higher education and democracy landscapes. These four goals could help illuminate a way forward if and when external factors force practitioners to re-evaluate their strategies for reaching 100% student voter participation by helping them zero in on what was driving success in the first place. The Ask Every Student and action planning goals could also uncover early signs of how new policies are impacting nonpartisan student voter engagement work. Regardless, as we move through 2025, the Student Vote Research Network is excited about the possibility of new knowledge created from the work to advance each of these priorities.
If you’d like to attend the Student Vote Research Network’s annual workshop in Chicago on April 3, where experts from around the country will discuss how these and other priorities can inspire research and create knowledge in the movement for 100% student voter participation, there’s still time to sign up! If you want to be added to the agenda to share work you conducted in 2024 to motivate or better understand student voting, please fill out this form to propose a presentation and request travel support (if needed). If you’re interested in attending but not presenting, please fill out this form to RSVP and request travel support (if needed).