The country is at war. The job market is shaky. And students actually are paying attention. That was the conclusion of a survey of University of Illinois students by I-ELECT, a political reporting project in conjunction with the College of Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Students reported caring most about the war and the economy.

“The two are of great importance to college students just as they are of great importance to the larger electorate,” said Jim Nowlan, a political analyst with the university’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs. “That maybe counterintuitive to a sense that students … are thought to be more interested in the hot-button issues than in the bread-and-butter issues.”

Issues on which protests and marches usually center, such as the environment, abortion, gay marriage and affirmative action, all rated less highly among survey respondents.

Instead, the economy, the war and higher education funding all tied, with statistically insignificant differences. Health care followed closely.

“I think the fascinating result from this is that it confirms that for college students, as well as the larger electorate, the economy still, although statistically insignificant, is more important than the war in Iraq,” Nowlan said.

More than 89 percent said the economy was important. Roughly 36 percent said it was “extremely important.” For the war, those figures were 84 and 39 percent.

Though the war rated highly, the survey found little correlation between the importance of the war and life experience. Military experience or a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan had little effect on the lives of respondents or those they knew.

“Most of us don’t know people who are over there serving, and we can keep the war at arm’s length,” said Scott Althaus, an associate professor of political science and speech communication at the university.

Some experts explained that although most students have not personally felt the effects of war, they have a perspective on world affairs that their parents might not have.

The deaths of more than 3,000 people in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., has brought home a new kind of political motivation. The terrorist attacks happened more than three years ago, meaning many college students have simply grown up with the thought of terrorism as a national issue, said former Republican Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar, now an analyst and professor at the university’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs.

“Mostly, people here haven’t been through a war. They haven’t been touched by the terrorists, but they saw what happened,” Edgar said. “It’s had an impact even though it hasn’t personally touched them. I think that underscores the depth of that issue.”

However, the survey found personal experience does drive interest in the economy. Respondents cited serious economic hardship, a lost job and struggling to pay for college as experiences affecting their lives, or the life of someone close to them. As a respondent’s life was affected by one - or all three - of those issues, his or her rating of the economy’s importance rose.

“(That doesn’t) surprise me because of the uncertainty that college students, in most areas, have had about their career development out of college,” Nowlan said. “Higher education funding - the amount of loans being born by students apparently is growing all the time and so I don’t think that surprises me.”

Today’s college students face a job market and an economy much different from the ones their parents saw, experts said. In the 1960s, a college degree nearly guaranteed a good job. Today, students worry more about the economy, perhaps because they’ve personally seen tough times.

“(Students) are a little more realistic than perhaps we were in the 60s,” Edgar said. “I think it’s understandable that they’re going to worry about the economy because they’re very soon going to be thrust out into that.”

In the survey, 394 University students responded, yielding a response rate of 33 percent and margin of error plus or minus five percentage points. From Sept. 26 to Oct. 7, e-mails were sent to 1,184 people, a random sampling of all publicly available student e-mails. Each e-mail gave the respondent a unique identification number and directed them to a Web page to take the approximately five-minute survey. Several reminder e-mails were sent while the survey was ongoing.

The survey asked people to rank the importance of nine issues. It also asked students to rate the influence of various factors and experiences on their political views, as well as importance of various types of media.

Students could decide to take the survey or delete the e-mails, meaning that those responding might have been politically interested or fell compelled to take the survey.

Experts said that might be one reason why 87 percent of students said they were registered to vote or planned to. And 83 percent said they’d be voting this November.

But experts also say polls - including the I-ELECT survey - show a higher degree of interest in this election than most others in history.

“The higher of anxiety about one’s future, the greater the likelihood people will turn out to cast their ballots for somebody that they think can reduce the level of anxiety they feel,” Nowlan said.

He pointed to high numbers of newly registered voters at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus and elsewhere around the nation.

Still Nowlan, Edgar and others remain skeptical about whether all the efforts spent registering voters will pay off at the polls.

“Young people need to understand what is at stake in the election impacts them more than any other age group,” Edgar said, “because they’re going to be stuck with the results a lot longer than anybody else.”