In the wake of the extraordinarily close 2000 presidential election with meager turnout among young citizens, this time around a slew of efforts ranging from Rock the Vote to the Bush twins are trying to get young people to cast ballots. But a new report finds that colleges and universities, the most obvious institutions to engage students in the democratic process, have been derelict in that responsibility.

According to a just released survey from Harvard's Institute of Politics, many schools are failing to comply with the Higher Education Act's requirement that they make "a good faith effort to distribute a mail voter registration form" to each student and to "make such forms widely available to students at the institution." At a minimum, schools are supposed to request voter registration forms 120 days before the deadline. Only 17% of schools surveyed completed that one required task.

Using a more expansive definition of compliance with the law to include simply making registration forms available on campus or having a voter registration drive, the study found just under two-thirds of schools comply.

One especially interesting finding is that public colleges and universities, especially those with two-year programs, were doing substantially more to register students to vote than private, four-year institutions. About three-fourths of public universities complied with the "spirit" of the law, while just over half of private institutions did. This means some of the nation's most elite schools are doing the worst job of getting young people to engage in the most basic form of citizen participation.

Every election we hear the same laments about young people's apathy. At the same time, we look to our educational system to make our young people into better citizens. There are constant calls for more "civic education" as the answer to the problem. If our most esteemed institutions cannot take minimal steps to get the young people literally living in their own backyards to register to vote, maybe we need to rethink our starting point.

Tova Andrea Wang is a program officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.