I suspect you've heard about the stunning margin of the youth vote--how
18-29 year-olds supported Democratic congressional candidates over
Republicans by a massive 60% to 38% difference. They did so in every
region
of the country, from a 74-25% split in the East to a 51-48% margin in
the
South. They provided the winning margin for Tester in Montana and Webb
in
Virginia, and helped put McCaskill over the top in Missouri. Had it been
up
to them, the Democrats would have also won Senate races in Tennessee,
Arizona, and Nevada; Ned Lamont would have defeated Joe Lieberman, and
a
slew of additional House seats would have changed hands. The Democrats
would
have elected Senators from 26 states, with Republicans carrying Texas,
Utah,
Wyoming, and the Maine seat of moderate Olympia Snow. Studies suggest
that
young voters tend to keep the political identifications they develop
in
their first few elections (for instance, the young adults who helped
cascade
Reagan into office have tended to remain more conservative as they've
gotten
older than those in the late Vietnam-era generation). So if Democrats
address the legitimate needs of this generation, they have a chance to
make
it a key part of a continuing majority.
Young voters have been leaning Democratic since the Clinton years, although
Nader siphoned off enough support in 2000 to make it a near-dead heat.
They
were the only generation to favor Kerry, and did so by a ten percent
margin.
Now the gap has opened wider than ever, fueled by the Iraq war (and friends
returning emotionally or physically wounded), by the religious right's
attacks on sexuality, and by an economy whose terrain has become
increasingly difficult for all but the wealthiest. Combining the children
of
late Baby Boomers and of immigrants, this generation will eventually
become
the largest in the country. Some of their issues, such as Iraq, global
warming, and the decline of low-end and middle-income wages, cut across
generational lines. But this generation also faces specific obstacles,
like
the financial barriers that make higher education increasingly unaffordable
for any but the children of the wealthy. Age 24 is the point after which
the likelihood of ever graduating from college plummets. If your family
is
in the top quarter in annual income, you have an 82% chance of getting
a
bachelor's degree by then. If you're in the bottom half of the population,
your chances are just 12%--and only 10% if you're in the bottom quarter
Nancy Pelosi has already vowed to make student financial aid a priority.
But
the Democrats need to take this fight to the campuses, where most students
are distracted from the votes and issues that profoundly affect their
lives--and often wonder whether political efforts even matter. By age
29,
57% of all Americans will have completed some college, with others returning
later. So we're talking about a major slice of the populace, and this
country's major route to decent job prospects. Access to education won't
solve our every ill, but in this area, as in so many others, Democrats
need
to link seemingly individual challenges with public solutions.
The barriers students face have been building since low-income wages
began
to stagnate in the mid-seventies, and since Reagan began shifting federal
financial aid from grants (which don't get paid back) to the loans that
now
saddle the average college graduate with nearly $20,000 of debt. More
affluent students benefited from some of the new programs, but for those
who
were low-income things got steadily harder. Even the Clinton programs
did
nothing for those at the bottom, since his prime successful initiatives,
the
Hope and Lifetime Learning credits, were based on income tax refunds
and
consequently provided no help to poor families who paid out for Social
Security but were under the income tax threshold.
The encounter that crystallized the shift happened a few years ago,
when I
met a student who lived on the same Brooklyn block where I had lived
while
attending college in the early seventies. I'd worked my way through school
as a bartender, making $5 an hour for twenty hours a week. I paid my
tuition
at a private university with costs as high as any in the nation, paid
my
food, rent, and books, and had money left over to go out on the weekends.
Twenty-five years later, this student was working 30 hours a week for
$6 an
hour, a fraction in real dollars of what I'd been making. He commuted
an
hour and a half each way to the City College of New York, a public school
with tuition far higher proportionate to his earnings than my private
college tuition was to me. He kept dropping out and working fulltime
to try
to avoid getting too deep in debt, but would still owe $15,000 or more
when
and if he graduated. Though he was working harder than I had, the rules
had
changed to make his passage vastly more difficult.
The situation of those working their way through school has continued
to get
harder. College costs have skyrocketed. Low-income wages have stagnated.
So
have federal financial aid programs aimed at low-income students. In
1980,
the maximum Pell Grant covered 77% of the average cost of attending a
public
institution. It now covers just 33%. In December 2005, the Bush
administration made the situation far worse by cutting $12.7 billion
in
Federal financial aid. They reduced Pell Grants, cut successful low-income
support projects like some of the Trio programs, and enacted major cuts
in
student loan subsidies, which will leave students paying far higher interest
rates for years.
The result is a perfect storm of financial constraints that threatens
the
already problematic access of low-income students to higher education.
Most
have little sense of the policies that will leave them so financially
burdened that many will either drop out before they finish, or never
start
to begin with, and others may postpone raising families, buying houses
or
entering the careers to which their passions draw them. I speak at colleges
throughout the country, and in the past year have asked the students
I've
met whether they knew about the Bush administration's recent draconian
aid
cuts. A few knew, maybe one in five. The rest had no sense the cuts had
even
occurred, in part because their greatest impact was buried in the fine
print
of student loan agreements.
As a result, their voices were silent when the cuts went through. The
major
higher education associations did lobby against them, but few college
presidents did anything to mobilize their students. The United States
Student Association (USSA), the excellent association of student
governments, did create some strong phone call and letter writing campaigns,
which helped create enough resistance so that the bill passed the U.S.
Senate by just a single vote. But given the significance of the cuts,
the
campus outcry was minimal.
The same has been true with other ways this administration has made
it
harder to get through college. A general sense that the Republicans were
making things harder did contribute to the generation's electoral shifts,
along with organizing by groups like the PIRGs, Rock the Vote, the League
of
Young Voters, and Music for America. But most students never heard about
the
changes in welfare rules requiring recipients, often single mothers,
to work
far more hours at outside jobs, even if going to school full time. Unless
they were directly affected, they heard little or nothing about Bush's
ban
on federal financial aid to students with drug convictions-which has
had no
impact on affluent partiers (such as the president himself when he was
"young and reckless," or the royal Bush daughters) but has prevented
over
200,000 prospective students from getting federal assistance. Most heard
little about Bush's bankruptcy bill--lobbied through by immensely profitable
credit card companies that will gleefully offer a credit card to your
dog,
cat, or 12-year-old-and how it ensures that no matter how bad their
financial situation, student debts will follow them for the rest of their
lives.
Taken together, these changes close opportunities for all but the
privileged. But they don't have to stand. Speaker-elect Pelosi is already
proposing to halve the interest rates on various federal loans, increase
the
maximum Pell grant from $4,050 to $5,100, and increase the tax deductibility
of tuition. USSA has been supporting these same measures while lobbying
for
the new Congress also to rescind the ban on financial aid to those with
drug
convictions and to support adequate child care for single parents working
their way through school. Congress could go further still by enacting
Pell
Grant increases that actually matched the increases in college costs
since
the program was founded. They could pass a bill, like one Ted Kennedy
proposed this past summer, that would address the problem of financially
pressed students bypassing public service careers, like teaching, social
work, or serving as firefighters or police officers, by capping loan
repayments at 15 as a percentage of income and allowing loan debt
forgiveness for public sector employees who make 10 years of repayments.
Democrats could even look to the G.I. Bill as a model, and how, by making
possible the college education of an entire generation (at least for
the
men), it both opened up unprecedented opportunity and fueled America's
post-war economic boom.
Opponents are already saying that even the most minimal shifts are too
costly, or politically impossible. Yet we might remember that the Bush
administration passed over $100 billion a year in top bracket tax cuts,
all
of which could be rescinded. The Iraq was has already cost nearly $350
billion, or enough to give almost 17,000,000 complete four-year scholarships
at public universities. My local paper just ran an article on how a million
dollars no longer buys a luxury home. The money exists in our culture,
if
we're willing to debate our priorities.
Passing new laws to broaden access to higher education won't be easy.
But
the Democrats could consider it an opportunity. Whether or not they can
pass
the necessary bills over Bush's potential veto, they now have a chance
to
reach out and organize, particularly on campuses whose students are used
to
politicians ignoring them. If they can do enough to highlight the crisis
in
access to education, they can give grassroots campus groups a major boost
in
getting their peers involved. They can help engage students in drawing
the
links between how they or their classmates struggle to pay for their
schooling and the larger priorities of our country. Precisely because
their
opponents will claim that resources are simply too scarce, they'll have
a
chance to link this with other urgent questions about what kind of common
investments will build the strongest society. They have to be careful,
of
course, to keep the focus on the fundamental stories about what it means
to
be poor and trying to get through school in America-progressives in general
are all too comfortable with putting to people to sleep with an endless
maze
of statistics and sub-clauses. But if they can really fight to reopen
higher education opportunity for all, they'll win whether or not they
can
initially pass every desired piece of legislation. And a generation already
inclined to support them just might give them their long-term allegiance.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little
While: A
Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book
of
2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous
books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical
Time.
See www.paulloeb.org To receive his monthly articles email
sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles
This article ran originally on www.thenation.com
