While other students such as those at Harvard University are already being counted in this year's U.S. Census, Dartmouth students are still waiting for the much-publicized forms to land outside their dorm room doors -- and all that's known is that they'll hit sometime before May 6.
The Office of Residential Life is currently working with census bureau officials to organize the distribution of census questionnaires at the College, said Emily Farnham, fiscal officer for Residential Life. The exact date and method of distribution is not yet determined, however.
The Harvard Crimson reported this week the start of Harvard's collection of student responses, including the hiring of trained students to collect surveys in dining halls and to answer questions.
According to Kim Crews, Chief of the Educational Partnership Branch in the U.S. Census Bureau, the forms will be delivered directly to students' dorm rooms.
Students living at the colleges they attend are not counted in family census responses. Instead, they are counted at their educational institutions.
Dormitories, along with prisons, nursing homes and other institutions, are considered "group quarters" and their residents are enumerated separately from the general U.S. population, Crews said.
While most households in the United States received the forms for this year's census by mail on or before April 1--known officially as "Census Day"--census bureau officials are just now beginning to make their rounds at the nation's colleges and universities, organizing operations for the door-to-door delivery of census questionnaires to every dorm room, according to Dolores Jeter, a survey statistician in the Decennial Data Collection Branch of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Census bureau officials hope to get a 100 percent response rate from college students, Jeter said.
According to Crews, the mail-back response rate thus far is 60 percent and is expected to rise with the approach of the April 26 deadline. In 1990, the year of the last U.S. Census, the final mail-back response rate was 65 percent.
The results of the U.S. Census are used to apportion Congress and to determine funding for various government programs and services, such as healthcare and transportation.
