Bureau: UI, WSU students should be counted on the Palouse

Many University of Idaho and Washington State University students will be away from the Palouse on Census Day, April 1, but, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, students still “should be counted where they live and sleep most of the time.”

“Per the Census Bureau’s residence criteria, in most cases, students living away from home at school should be counted at school, even if they are temporarily elsewhere due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the release said.

In response to the coronavirus, UI and WSU will move classes online when students return from spring break next week, but plenty of students are not expected to return to the Pullman and Moscow campuses and will study from their hometowns instead.

WSU spokesman Phil Weiler said the university sent a survey to students asking them if they plan to return to campus after spring break, but only about 500 responded, so it is difficult to know how many will come back, he said.

UI spokeswoman Jodi Walker said UI is encouraging students to stay home and not return to campus because of the coronavirus. She said she expects most will stay where they are, and some will return because they do not have certain technology infrastructure to participate in online classes.

Regardless of where they are, Weiler and Walker said they are reminding students to complete the census according to where they live most of the year.

Walker said the university put a communication plan in place encouraging students to complete the census, but because of COVID-19 and poor past participation in the census, she expects census participation among students to be similar to previous census years.

The census directly affects the distribution of $675 billion in federal dollars annually and is used to determine how many congressional seats each state has. It also affects redistricting, the process by which new congressional and state legislative district boundaries are drawn.

U.S. Census Bureau officials say this year they hope to see greater participation from the Palouse’s two chronically under-counted counties.

According to the bureau, Whitman and Latah counties — specifically areas inhabited by college students in Moscow and Pullman — have some of the worst census response rates in their respective states.

Weiler said WSU will electronically submit census data on behalf of students who live on campus, which is 4,000 to 6,000 students.

The other 15,000 to 16,000 students who live off campus will need to count themselves, he said.

Walker said she does not know of an effort by UI to count on-campus residents.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau release, it is encouraging administrators of group housing to choose a way to count their residents that requires less in-person contact.

For the “group quarters” operation, which counts people in nursing homes, college dorms, prisons and other institutional living facilities, the bureau offers a myriad of ways to respond, including eResponse, paper listing or self-enumeration by the facility, the release said.

Toby Nelson, U.S. Census Bureau spokesman in Seattle, said on-campus college students do not have contact with the U.S. Census Bureau for the most part as they typically work with college administration to get counted through the group quarters operation.

Moscow Mayor Bill Lambert said he and Latah County commissioners will soon sign a letter to UI President Scott Green asking what steps can be taken to make sure students are counted.

“We’ve been working hard for two months about drilling home that we need to get these college kids counted because it’s so very, very important in this area,” Lambert said.

The release said the planned completion date for data collection of the census is July 31, but that date will be adjusted, if necessary, as the COVID-19 situation evolves.

Garrett Cabeza can be reached at (208) 883-4631, or by email to gcabeza@dnews.com.