When the pandemic sent much of the nation’s college students home, it gave local officials concern that the decennial U.S. Census would not count them living in their dorms, thus shrinking the population of college towns across the country.

 A Census official said they prepared. 

When the University of Illinois and most other colleges across Illinois told students not to return to campus after spring break in March, it represented an exodus from college such as like Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington-Normal, DeKalb, Macomb, and Carbondale because a significant portion of their population is made up of college students. 

Local officials were concerned about what it meant when April came and went and students weren’t there to be counted in the Census. As many Illinois municipalities are all too aware of, losing population means losing federal and state allocations that are often based on headcount.

The U.S. Census anticipated the problem and took steps to make sure those towns weren’t undercounted. 

“We asked them to remind their students to please respond to where you would have been living on April 1,”  Census spokeswoman Virginia Hyer said. “If you were going to be living off-campus in your college town, you needed to be counted at that location.” 

Counting the students in their dorms when they were actually home also meant Census counters had to remove the occasional duplication of a resident in the university dorms and their parents’ basement. 

“If they were counted at their home of record and by the school, we would count them at the school because that’s based on where they were living on April 1,” Hyer said. 

As of Monday, the Census estimates that 95.1 percent of all Illinois households had been counted. The deadline to be counted is Sept. 30.