On April 18, an effort to organize flash mobs nationwide took place with the hopes of grabbing Stephen Colbert's attention.
The event, called Fix Young America, was developed to raise awareness about the struggles facing recent college graduate in the job market.
"National is the one who decided on him in particular because he is such a well known figure," Ball State junior Jacque Schrag said. "'The Colbert Report' is on every day, so people watch him; he's relevant. If you have somebody that college students take seriously, they're more likely to pay attention to this kind of cause."
The National Society of Collegiate Scholars is pushing to raise awareness of the difficulties college graduates face when seeking a job after school.
Schrag is president of Ball State's NSCS chapter and said what they're trying to do is bring awareness to the issue through flash mob rallies.
"We're bringing up the issue about how students going to college, a lot of us can get a lot of debt by taking out loans and things like that," Shrag said. "There's over 300 chapters nationwide of NSCS, and even if a third of those rallied on the same day at the same time, that's going to attract some kind of attention."
The Ball State NSCS chapter's attempt at the rally fell short due to administrative issues, but they were still able to raise awareness through social media.
"Because we weren't able to get administrative permission for the rally, we did all of our promoting for it online using Twitter and Facebook," she said.
Rachel Thornton, manager of member engagement, said NSCS has been able to gain attention through these rallies and felt that most of the chapters did a good job preparing for the event.
"Essentially before the rallies took place, we were putting information out there. We had a few articles; MTV-U was involved and they did a couple of videos," Thornton said. "All of the chapters we've worked with across the board were pretty active with it, and they all did everything that they could to get the message out there."
Thornton was able to attend a rally at Ohio State and said the rally went great.
"The officers had games lined up for people to play to help them get more involved with coming, and we also spread information about the unemployment rate and trying to get more people involved that way," she said.
Thornton said she hadn't been briefed since the rallies took place but has noticed a change in attention to the cause.
"I know right now if you Google the Fix Young America rallies, there's a lot of articles listed from MTV-U, there's some from the Huffington Post [and] we had something in Mashable," she said. "We definitely got a little bit of publicity out there."
Although NSCS isn't trying to urge any politicians to pass legislation, the members said they feel the main message is worth Colbert's attention.
"It's just bringing ... attention to the fact that life is great in your four years of college but as soon as you get out into the real world there are these issues that you have to face," Schrag said.
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