Usually, students spend mornings coming to their senses after an exhausting night of work or partying. This week, however, the Census will be coming to them.
One by one, on-campus students will be counted this week as part of the U.S. Census. Starting Wednesday, enumerators will parade around dormitories, handing out forms and urging students to take part in the once-a-decade count of the entire United States population.
Students living on Central Campus and off-campus have already received their forms, but because the Census is not mailed to post office boxes, officials will do the count by hand.
"They consider colleges and universities to be special places, places that they target differently, and we're working to make sure that RAs in the dorms know when it's coming," said Anne Light, the special assistant to Associate Vice President for Auxiliary Services Joe Pietrantoni who has been working with Census officials.
Enumerators will begin on East Campus Wednesday, eventually moving to Trent Dormitory and then to West Campus, Light said.
Students can return their completed forms to the Census worker, their resident adviser or their housing service office.
Duke has given the Census a list of all students' names, and officials said they will work to ensure total compliance by contacting students who do not return a completed form. "For Duke students, they need to complete the Census so that they're seen as a person in that particular age group, that particular ethnicity, that they are assigned to that particular area," said Wade Chestnut, manager of the Durham Census office, which is also overseeing the count at Elon College, North Carolina Central University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He added that students are not counted where their parents live because they spend most of the year at their campus address.
Chestnut said that making sure off-campus students complete the Census is particularly difficult. "On campus is somewhat more controlled, if you will," he said.
As an example of how the environment on campus is so controlled, all enumerators are either students or adults who have passed the University's security clearance.
As they pass through the dorms, Census takers will hand out two types of forms: short and long.
The short form, which will be given to five-sixths of students, takes about five minutes to complete and asks for basic information about the student's address and ethnicity.
Selected randomly, one in six of the on-campus students receive the long form, which takes about 20 minutes to complete. This version, a special form for people living in group quarters, includes more detailed questions about working habits.
Chestnut stressed that a high compliance rate on the Census ensures that North Carolina receives the proper amount of representatives in Congress as well as the right proportion of federal funding.
"A lot of this data is used not only for developing funding proposals in Washington and Raleigh, but also for the city and county to assess where additional services needed to be added as the area grows," he said. "The key is getting the students to complete the [forms]... and return them, because it is one of the more important things they can do for the next 10 years."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.