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Brandon Mill, a 12-year-old from Coeur D'Alene, decorated his Ron Paul sign with lights in anticipation of the Sandpoint, ID rally on March 5. (Photo by Ilona Idlis/UW Election Eye)

SANDPOINT — It’s no secret that the Ron Paul campaign is fueled by youth energy and participation, but most expect to see college students and twenty-something voters at events. The crowd inside the Bonner County Fair building at today’s rally proved that love for Paul runs much, much younger.

In the midst of hundreds of older Idahoans in camouflage baseball caps and Carhartt jackets, high school students from multiple local schools chatted excitedly as an orange school bus dropped off teenage supporters.

Sandpoint High School student Paul Hill said there were over 50 students here from his high school. Some came with their American Government class, but Hill was here as a four-year Paul supporter.

“He doesn’t shy away from addressing the issues directly,” he said. “I think he’ll be a great president.”

Twelve-year-old Brandon Mill thought so, too. The middle school student drove up to the rally from Coeur D’Alene with members of his family. In preparation for the event, the young Mill strung a Paul picket sign with lights that shone brightly in the huge venue.

With a Marine father, Mill valued Paul’s foreign policy stance the most.

“He’s going to bring all of our troops home, where they should be, where they’ll be safe and protecting our country instead of fighting foreign wars that don’t need to be fought,” he said.

Make sure to check out Mill’s further thoughts about Ron Paul in the video below:

Rick Santorum in Detroit, Michigan (James Fassinger/The Guardian)

At an event outside Detroit last Saturday, Rick Santorum called President Obama a “snob” for wanting everyone in America to go to college. He continued to say that Obama wants people to go to college so that he can “remake them in his image,” and that college graduates are more likely to abandon their religious identities. This is not the first time he’s called Obama a snob on the topic.

Obama announced in 2009 that he wants America to once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 and continues to urge state governors to spend money on higher education.

Despite rising tuition costs, there are more high school graduates going to college than ever before. The question of return on investment is a central one — and one no institution can avoid. The University of Washington has launched the Two Years to Two Decades Initiative for just this reason. But evidence still points to the continued value of a college degree.

While it’s not surprising that one of the audience members is wearing a University of Michigan fleece coat in the video from the Santorum event below (you can spot him starting at 1:02) — UM boasts over 26,000 undergraduates enrolled –  it’s an interesting juxtaposition.

Santorum has kicked up quite a response with his recent remarks, and he is not the only Republican hopeful to take a stab at higher education. But whether or not this is a winning argument remains to be seen.  Protestant and Catholic experts are already disputing his claims about the correlation between issues of faith and a college diploma.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that while Santorum may be skeptical of higher education, he holds three degrees and his religious conviction appears to have held up just fine. And those three degrees? They put him one ahead of Obama, who has only two.