YDS Activist Agenda Proposal: Student Debt
Student Debt: Restoring the Public Good for Youth
The financial odds are stacked against most students. Tuition rates in both public and private secondary education are rising. Simultaneously, financial aid and grants are being cut across the board. Increasingly students are turning to corporate lenders offering high interest loans. The companies, representing only their profit, endanger the possibilities of returning higher education to the public good. The rising costs of education weaken universities and colleges abilities to open their doors to students of all socio-economic classes. While unfair divisions have always existed in higher learning in the US, the economic divide is at its worst in decades.
Long gone are the days of free public universities. The GI Bill is a distant memory: a legislative act where the federal government sponsored college educations for veterans. This dramatically expanded (albeit mostly for whites) the middle-class. Interest free grants and scholarship seem to vanish. A college degree seems less like a ticket to success and more like a sentence to years of debt.
Here are some of the facts:
1. 39% of students graduate with unmanageable debt (8% of their monthly incomes)
2. During the 2006-2007 school year, average tuition, fees, room & board charges for in state students at public institutions was $12,976. In 1987 those same costs were just $7,528.
3. The maximum Pell Grant now covers 33% of tuition fees, room & board at the average four-year college. Twenty years ago it covered 66%.
4. In 2005-6, students received a total of $134.8 Billion in student aid. About 44% of this aid was from grants and 51% from loans. Just 15 years ago, those figures were reserved.[1]
As democratic socialist young people, we must articulate to our peers that this does not have to be. All across the world, students receive excellent university educations at a fraction of the cost we do. Their governments support young people pursuit of knowledge and put a high priority on funding education. Likewise, many students vigorously defend their rights as students to education. As American democratic socialists, it is up to us to illustrate the belief (shared by millions across the globe) that education is a right, not a privilege.
In addition, the Young Democratic Socialists brings a different perspective to the Student Debt debate than our allies. We can be the ones open about the source of the problem: privatization and increased power of capitalism over education. The YDS Chapter at Bowling Green SU-Firelands “Loan Abatement” campaign offers the challenge: how can capital’s debt be forgiven but students, who represent an investment in the future, are denied similar loan abatement? We know the answer is the power of capitalists in our society. It is up to YDS to educate the student public of corporate power in education, privatization as part of a larger neo-liberal plan, and socialist and social democratic alternatives for a publicly financed university system.
There are several things YDS chapters can do:
1) Sponsor legislation such as “Opportunity Maine” in their states.
2) Collaborate with National Youth and Student Peace Coalition partners on student debt. Education was one of the six issues of NYSPC’s “Youth Agenda.” For example, we can work with the United States Student Association on reauthorizing the “Higher Education Act”
3) Do public socialist education on the power of corporate interests in student debt.
4) Do public education of privatization and under-funding of schools as connected to a larger effort to undercut the public good by the right-wing and centrist allies. [1] United States Students Association, Congressional Fact Sheet: Higher Education Act Reauthorization, 2007: http://www.usstudents.org/ussaDir/files/documents/Legislative_materials/factsheets/HEA07.pdf
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Private: YDS Activist Agenda Proposal: Student Debt
Student Debt: Restoring the Public Good for Youth
The financial odds are stacked against most students. Tuition rates in both public and private secondary education are rising. Simultaneously, financial aid and grants are being cut across the board. Increasingly students are turning to corporate lenders offering high interest loans. The companies, representing only their profit, endanger the possibilities of returning higher education to the public good. The rising costs of education weaken universities and colleges abilities to open their doors to students of all socio-economic classes. While unfair divisions have always existed in higher learning in the US, the economic divide is at its worst in decades.
Long gone are the days of free public universities. The GI Bill is a distant memory: a legislative act where the federal government sponsored college educations for veterans. This dramatically expanded (albeit mostly for whites) the middle-class. Interest free grants and scholarship seem to vanish. A college degree seems less like a ticket to success and more like a sentence to years of debt.
Here are some of the facts:
1. 39% of students graduate with unmanageable debt (8% of their monthly incomes)
2. During the 2006-2007 school year, average tuition, fees, room & board charges for in state students at public institutions was $12,976. In 1987 those same costs were just $7,528.
3. The maximum Pell Grant now covers 33% of tuition fees, room & board at the average four-year college. Twenty years ago it covered 66%.
4. In 2005-6, students received a total of $134.8 Billion in student aid. About 44% of this aid was from grants and 51% from loans. Just 15 years ago, those figures were reserved.[1]
As democratic socialists, we must articulate to our peers that this does not have to be. All across the world, students receive excellent university educations at a fraction of the cost we do. Their governments support young peoples’ pursuit of knowledge and put a high priority on funding education. Likewise, many vigorously defend their rights as students to education. As American democratic socialists, it is up to us to illustrate the belief (shared by millions across the globe) that education is a right, not a privilege. In addition, the Young Democratic Socialists brings a different perspective to the Student Debt debate than our allies. We can be the ones open about the source of the problem: privatization and increased power of capitalism over education. The YDS Chapter at Bowling Green SU-Firelands “Loan Abatement” campaign offers the challenge: how can capital’s debt be forgiven but students, who represent an investment in the future, are denied similar loan abatement? We know the answer is the power of capitalists in our society. It is up to YDS to educate the student public of corporate power in education, privatization as part of a larger neo-liberal plan, and socialist and social democratic alternatives for a publicly financed university system. There are several things YDS chapters can do:
1) Sponsor legislation such as “Opportunity Maine” in their states.
2) Collaborate with National Youth and Student Peace Coalition partners on student debt. Education was one of the six issues of NYSPC’s “Youth Agenda.” For example, we can work with the United States Student Association on reauthorizing the “Higher Education Act”
3) Do public socialist education on the power of corporate interests in student debt.
4) Do public education of privatization and under-funding of schools as connected to a larger effort to undercut the public good by the right-wing and centrist allies.
[1] United States Students Association, Congressional Fact Sheet: Higher Education Act Reauthorization, 2007: http://www.usstudents.org/ussaDir/files/documents/Legislative_materials/factsheets/HEA07.pdf
4 Comments
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This seems like the obvious rallying point for student organizing, and to a lesser degree their parents. In NYC, only 33% of the non-selective public high schools have adequate laboratories to even allow the possibility of a competitive freshman application. Forget, arts funding, and all of this on top of the inequities in standardized testing based on class and ethnicity. The fact that any student that works hard enough to get accepted to college should be able to go without tuition and fees. Living expenses while not working FT should be their only concern. It is an investment in a internationally competitive workforce, reduces unemployment by certifying more qualified workers, results in high tax yields in all areas (income, property, sales) due to higher income earlier in life, it reduces reliance on costly public services, and most importantly, it starts to make good on the American Dream that all are truly equal in fact and not theory. Many, many students in underfunded schools are understandably apathetic to education, or openly hostile, since they can see the inequities in opportunity, so they stop trying. It reinforces our tiered society and its growing gap between rich and poor. It perpetuates cycles of economic depression in poorer communities. Frankly, it seems rather Prussian, calculated to keep the masses of Americans at the most minimal level of education, so they are ignorant of the whys and wherefores of decisionmaking in government, business, and community, and cannot represent their own interests. It reminds me of the Dead Kennedys’ song “Kill the Poor”, which is bloody scary. More later on student debt, the life choices it forces, the 13th Amendment (again) against coerced labor, options for students in public universities to claim the reccommending power in institutional decisionmaking that is often legislated, yet rarely exerted, esp. successfully. Public universities have been the only venues where grad student unions have been recognized, and can be points of incredible strength, esp. when working in conjunction with faculty & staff senates and unions. The AFT has published some useful documents on “shared governance”, and CA’s Ed Code Title V is a great model of student-centered governance legislation. NY students at public colleges enjoy similar rights to *full*, voting participation (except on human resources issues and lawsuits). As Paris preached in ‘92, “Being broke is slavery, if your skin is brown, they only want you to stay down.”
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Oh, and Sallie Mae is a wholly owned subsidiary of Satan.
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Damn, I have to go but I can’t stop. Check out Mario Savio’s speech from Sproul Plaza at Berkeley in the early 60’s on YouTube, about the commodification of students to be cogs in the machine, and throwing our bodies upon its gears. Remember he had just got back from a summer organizing trip with SNCC to the south, where a number of young black men and their white allies were slain. Also, Stanley Aronowitz’s “The Knowledge Factory” is an excellent book on the socializing mission, corporate interests, research funding, control of thye distribution of social capital, and general structure of the postsecondary education industry (he refuses to call it “higher”). If you’re not thinking of it as an industry, you are living in a dream world, as the national trend toward corporate model administration has extended to public colleges in the most liberal parts of the country, and in private liberal arts colleges like Hampshire, reknowned for its progressive educational philosophy, which has now eliminated tenure for new hires, and has faculty on renewable three year contracts. What academic freedom can one have in such an environment?!
This seems like the obvious rallying point for student organizing, and to a lesser degree their parents. In NYC, only 33% of the non-selective public high schools have adequate laboratories to even allow the possibility of a competitive freshman application. Forget, arts funding, and all of this on top of the inequities in standardized testing based on class and ethnicity. The fact that any student that works hard enough to get accepted to college should be able to go without tuition and fees. Living expenses while not working FT should be their only concern. It is an investment in a internationally competitive workforce, reduces unemployment by certifying more qualified workers, results in high tax yields in all areas (income, property, sales) due to higher income earlier in life, it reduces reliance on costly public services, and most importantly, it starts to make good on the American Dream that all are truly equal in fact and not theory. Many, many students in underfunded schools are understandably apathetic to education, or openly hostile, since they can see the inequities in opportunity, so they stop trying. It reinforces our tiered society and its growing gap between rich and poor. It perpetuates cycles of economic depression in poorer communities. Frankly, it seems rather Prussian, calculated to keep the masses of Americans at the most minimal level of education, so they are ignorant of the whys and wherefores of decisionmaking in government, business, and community, and cannot represent their own interests. It reminds me of the Dead Kennedys’ song “Kill the Poor”, which is bloody scary. More later on student debt, the life choices it forces, the 13th Amendment (again) against coerced labor, options for students in public universities to claim the reccommending power in institutional decisionmaking that is often legislated, yet rarely exerted, esp. successfully. Public universities have been the only venues where grad student unions have been recognized, and can be points of incredible strength, esp. when working in conjunction with faculty & staff senates and unions. The AFT has published some useful documents on “shared governance”, and CA’s Ed Code Title V is a great model of student-centered governance legislation. NY students at public colleges enjoy similar rights to *full*, voting participation (except on human resources issues and lawsuits). As Paris preached in ‘92, “Being broke is slavery, if your skin is brown, they only want you to stay down.”
Oh, and Sallie Mae is a wholly owned subsidiary of Satan.
Damn, I have to go but I can’t stop. Check out Mario Savio’s speech from Sproul Plaza at Berkeley in the early 60’s on YouTube, about the commodification of students to be cogs in the machine, and throwing our bodies upon its gears. Remember he had just got back from a summer organizing trip with SNCC to the south, where a number of young black men and their white allies were slain. Also, Stanley Aronowitz’s “The Knowledge Factory” is an excellent book on the socializing mission, corporate interests, research funding, control of thye distribution of social capital, and general structure of the postsecondary education industry (he refuses to call it “higher”). If you’re not thinking of it as an industry, you are living in a dream world, as the national trend toward corporate model administration has extended to public colleges in the most liberal parts of the country, and in private liberal arts colleges like Hampshire, reknowned for its progressive educational philosophy, which has now eliminated tenure for new hires, and has faculty on renewable three year contracts. What academic freedom can one have in such an environment?!