While the bad economy and lack of jobs is no doubt weighing heavily on young people’s minds, this raises a question. If many young people lean Democrat, but when the economy is bad lean Republican, what exactly are they?

In the “Libertarian Vote in Age of Obama,” David Boaz and I presented evidence that many of these young people can fairly be called libertarian–that is socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. True, many young libertarians got swept up in the excitement over the Obama campaign, voting 59 percent for Obama to 36 percent McCain. But, we argued, all the talk of a generational realignment towards Obama and the Democrats was premature.

This generation of young people are particularly  prone to disillusionment. And we hypothesized that if the economy stayed bad, many young people, particularly the more libertarian young people, would sour on Obama and jump ship. Perhaps we’re now seeing some evidence that confirms this.

However, I don’t think Republicans are out of the woods yet. Even if young people vote against Democrats in 2010, Republicans will need to provide a credible alternative that addressed the concerns of a more libertarian-leaning generation of potential young voters. This will be a long-term challenge for a Republicans.

“Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics…. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings… every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.”

The [recent] British and German experiences also provide support for the Boaz/Kirby argument about the libertarian vote in the US. The FDP and Lib Dems have historically gotten around 10 percent of the vote, on par with Boaz and Kirby’s estimates of the size of the libertarian vote in the United States. Boaz and Kirby also argued that the political effectiveness of libertarians is maximized when libertarians aren’t too closely tied to either end of the political spectrum. A credible threat to walk away from the Republican Party and support Democrats will give both major parties an incentive to take libertarian voters. That certainly seems to be confirmed by recent developments in the UK, where the Liberal Democrats were able to push their coalition government in a direction more friendly to civil liberties.

It occurs to me that there’s another way libertarians in the US could learn from the British example. In the US, the libertarian movement has been tarnished by the confusion over the word “libertarian,” and its many negative connotations. In Britain, David Cameron described his vision for liberalism as “progressive conservatives.”  While libertarians wouldn’t agree with everything on Cameron’s agenda, could this be a better label for the libertarian brand in the US?

Kaplan University recently launched an advertizing campaign that announces in bold terms its aspirations to “use technology to rewrite the rules of higher education.” At an AEI event, KaplanU’s CEO Andrew Rosen argued that if you accept that incentives affect behavior, then you should expect that the quality of for-profit education should outperform non-profits over time. This is the “logical result” of a much clearer set of incentives – for customers, future employers, board members, and shareholders. If students don’t achieve learning outcomes and don’t get jobs, they’ll go somewhere else. For-profits must outperform or go out of business. Where does this logic lead? Rosen predicted that KaplanU will become the “world’s best educator by 2020.”

Is this corporate bravado or a genuine threat to traditional education? There is certainly evidence to support Rosen’s case. For instance, it took Harvard 25 years to recommend curricular reform in 2005. And the ideas sat on the shelf until 2007. Since then, progress has been uneven at best. Harvard’s case is by no means unique.

For those who appreciate that incentives matter, Rosen certainly seems to have a point. But I suspect that this past month’s hearings in the U.S. Congress on regulating for-profits is only a sneak preview of efforts to restrict this logic from playing out.