This year’s Civic Health Index asked respondents about many forms of civic participation. A closer look at subgroups reveals opportunities for increasing and sustaining their civic engagement.

On all the traditional measures of civic engagement, people with college degrees are far more active than people who have not attended college; and adults without high school diplomas lag furthest behind. Although the relationship between education and civic engagement has long been noted—in fact, it is the “best documented finding in American political behavior research”17—this relationship has become more pronounced over the last three decades. Opportunities for working-class people to engage have eroded, while more professional associations and interest groups recruit college graduates.

However, we find that younger people who have never attended college are reasonably well represented in online groups. Thus the Internet, mobile phones, and other new technologies provide opportunities to reduce inequality, at least among younger generations.

The 2008 America’s Civic Health Index survey confirms the civic-engagement gap between college graduates and other citizens.

We are especially concerned about the younger generation, because inequalities today will affect the future of our democracy. If we focus on people younger than 30, the gaps shown above are even more pronounced. Another way to document the differences between young Americans with and without any college experience is by means of pie charts that categorize people by types of engagement. The following charts show that non-college- educated young people are twice as likely to be uninvolved, and none of them are involved in several ways.18

Online activities have a somewhat different profile from traditional, face-to-face engagement. Considering adults of all ages, we find that college graduates simply use the Internet more—for example, they communicate with friends and family using computers at almost twice the rate of their non-college peers—and they are also more likely to use online tools for civic and political purposes.

However, when we compare a younger group—college-educated adults under 30 with their peers who have no college experience—rates of online participation are higher and some of the gaps are not very severe. For example, college- educated and non-college-educated young adults use social networking sites for social and political purposes at similar rates.

It makes sense that gaps in civic engagement are less consistent online than offline. Everyone who can gain access to the Internet has basically identical access to the same sites. In contrast, many offline organizations recruit people who have special skills or status, charge money to join and participate, and otherwise select citizens who are more advantaged.

Online participation may or may not be as meaningful or effective as traditional forms of civic participation. For example, it is not clear that emailing opinions about political issues can compensate for not attending political meetings and events, or that communicating online about spirituality can replace membership in a religious congregation. However, there at least seems to be a potential to use digital networks to recruit people of diverse backgrounds who are otherwise being left out of civil society.19