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WILKES-BARRE &mdash; Teri Ooms, Institute executive director at The Institute for Public Policy & Economic Development at Wilkes University, said The Institute operates a polling center and twice per year polls regional students from its academic partners.
				One of the polls focuses on student post-graduation plans and perception of the region and the other with public policy.
				&ldquo;The purpose of the annual student Public Policy and Civic Engagement Poll is to ascertain the experiences of college students of Northeastern Pennsylvania, and assess their familiarity with current trends in voting intention, civic participation, media dissemination, and awareness of current events,&rdquo; Ooms said.
				The Institute for Public Policy & Economic Development worked with each of its partner institutions to deploy the survey. Questions asked during this poll have been used to assess students&rsquo; opinions about the importance of certain public policy issues and their level of civic engagement.
				The participating colleges and universities included Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, Johnson College, Keystone College, Lackawanna College, Luzerne County Community College, Marywood University, Misericordia University, Penn State Scranton, Penn State Wilkes-Barre, University of Scranton, and Wilkes University.
				For this year&rsquo;s edition, there were a total of 2,204 student responses.
				According to Andrew Chew, Senior Research & Policy Analyst, students were asked to evaluate the importance of a wide range of national public policy issues. Chew said there was a &ldquo;fairly stratified separation&rdquo; among the views of students on the most important national public policy issues.
				&ldquo;Issues that students felt were of greatest importance included healthcare (63.1 percent), racism or civil rights (62.9 percent), cost of college education (59.6 percent), public health (59.2 percent), and corruption of government officials (58.1 percent),&rdquo; Chew said. &ldquo;Public policy issues receiving the fewest &ldquo;very important&rdquo; designations included the national debt (23.6 percent), taxes (24.5 percent), and Social Security (30.8 percent).&rdquo;
				Respondents were asked to indicate whether they believed the United States &mdash; and more specifically, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania &mdash; is moving in the right or wrong direction. Specifically, participants were given four response options &mdash; right direction, wrong direction, neither the right direction nor the wrong direction, and not sure.
				Regarding the direction of the country as a whole, a plurality of students (50.6 percent) indicated they felt the United States is moving in the wrong direction, followed by those who believe that the country is not moving in either the right or wrong direction (22.5 percent), those who believe the country is on the right track (14.1 percent), and those who are uncertain (12.8 percent).
				Chew said this year&rsquo;s findings show a greater proportion of respondents who think the U.S. is moving in the wrong direction (43.1 percent in 2019). He said the inverse was also true &#8211; a smaller proportion think the U.S. is moving in the right direction (17.7 percent in 2019).
				&ldquo;While the direction of the United States elicited clear opinions from 87.2 percent of students, only 62.4 percent of students were certain about the direction in which the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is heading,&rdquo; Chew said. &ldquo;Moreover, of these students, 24.1 percent indicated that the direction of Pennsylvania remains unchanged, followed by those who feel the Commonwealth is moving in the right direction (20.4 percent), and those who feel opposite (17.9 percent).&rdquo;
				This discrepancy in political engagement across the federal and state levels has been found in many of the previous student polls conducted by the Institute, Chew said. This year&rsquo;s findings broadly comport with previous observations in 2019, which found that 40.5 percent of students were uncertain about the Commonwealth&rsquo;s direction, and 2018 which identified the same uncertainty among approximately 43 percent of students.
				&ldquo;Over 83 percent of the students indicated they are registered to vote and nearly 5 percent were not sure whether or not they were registed,&rdquo; Chew said. &ldquo;About 87 percent indicated they were somewhat likely or very likely to vote, almost 9 percent not very or not at all likely to vote and a little over 4.5 percent were not sure. Nearly 90 percent of the students believe they are somewhat or very informed about current events and almost 73 percent get their information via the Internet through social media.&rdquo;
				Ooms said this is the 6th year the poll has been deployed.
				&ldquo;While there has been some change in the priority issues, there are some consistencies,&rdquo; Ooms said. &ldquo;The cost of college has remained a top priority, but this year was superseded by healthcare.&rdquo;
				Ooms said every Public Policy and Civic Engagement poll conducted thus far has asked respondents to indicate in what direction (if any) both the United States and Pennsylvania were heading. While the percentages of students selecting any given option have fluctuated over time, Ooms said some broader patterns still emerge.
				First, among students polled about the direction of the United States, a rising percentage of students feel the country is headed on the right track, from 12.0 percent in 2015 to 14.0 percent in 2020. In addition, the percentage of students who feel the country is headed in the wrong direction has increased by nine percentage points (42.0 percent to 51.0 percent). table 5
				Among students polled about the direction of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Ooms said long-term trends are more easily observable. She said in every poll conducted since 2015, the plurality of students are uncertain about the trajectory of Pennsylvania&rsquo;s direction, suggesting a possible disengagement from state-level politics as opposed to national developments.
				Among students who have more fully formed opinions of current events in Pennsylvania, however, Ooms said other observable trends emerge. For example, the number of students claiming Pennsylvania is heading in the wrong direction has steadily declined from 23.0 percent in 2015 to 14.0 percent in 2018, before rising three percentage points by 2020.
				Meanwhile, the percentage of students more optimistic about Pennsylvania&rsquo;s direction has increased from 14.0 percent to 20.0 percent from 2015 to 2020.
				&ldquo;Students who feel that Pennsylvania&rsquo;s direction remains unchanged are the second largest in number throughout the course of this poll, and have remained relatively static since 2016,&rdquo; Ooms said.

The Institute’s Polling Center assesses students opinions on issues