Student Voters Look to Candidates for  Answers to Crisis in Student Loans and College Affordability

 

With  problems growing in the student loan industry, spurred both by an ongoing  credit crunch with its roots in the subprime mortgage crisis and by  congressional legislation that cut subsidies to lenders of federal student  loans, the affordability of a higher education has remained at the forefront of  young Americans’ minds this election year.

 

Increases  in college tuition continue to outstrip the rate of inflation. Families, hurt  by mounting unemployment and high gas and food prices, are applying for federal  grants and student  loans in record numbers.

 

Lenders,  crippled by troubles in the nation’s credit markets and by a lack of subsidies  that have made federal college loans largely unprofitable, are dropping out of  the federal student loan business and tightening credit criteria on their  non-federal private  student loans or abandoning these credit-based private loans altogether —  leaving thousands of families scrambling to find a source for their federal and  private student loans.

 

Students  needing private student loans to supplement the federal college loans they have been able to get can’t find  co-signers with credit scores high enough to satisfy lenders’ increasingly  stringent credit criteria. And parents, who historically have been able to  borrow against the value of their house or draw on their investments to provide  the additional financing their college children may have needed, have watched  their stock values and home equity evaporate in the post-subprime housing and  financial breakdown.

 

Making Their Voice Heard — Finally — at the  Polls

 

Against  this backdrop of a rocky student loan landscape and a still-distressed economy,  Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s proposals to boost college accessibility may  prove to be a deciding factor in swaying the emergent youth vote, those ballots  being cast by the normally non-voting 18- to 30-year-olds that have already  proven to be a powerful force on the road to this year’s electoral showdown.

“Frustrated  by feckless Washington, energized by the unscripted, pundit-baffling freedom of  a wide-open race, young people are voting in numbers rarely seen since the  general election of 1972 — the first in which the voting age was lowered to  18,” wrote David Von Drehle back in January, in his piece, “The Year of the  Youth Vote,” for Time magazine.

 

More than  6.5 million voters under the age of 30 participated in the 2008 presidential  primaries and caucuses, making the age group an important demographic for  presidential hopefuls Obama and McCain at a time when national polls show the  two candidates are statistically tied or separated by only single digits in the  race for the White House.

Both  candidates are eyeing the votes of this emerging voting population — “an  estimated 50 million Twittering, text messaging, iPod-toting young voters” — in  the final stretches of this year’s general election, writes The Nation columnist Andy Kroll.

 

Candidates Speak to Higher Education Issues  Affecting Young Voters

 

In their  quest to woo these young voters, the candidates have promoted education  platforms that could give them the edge they need among the country’s 16  million college students and their families.

 

Obama,  the Democratic presidential candidate, outlines a host of national education  proposals that span early childhood education to college; McCain, the  presumptive Republican nominee, focuses on supporting local education  initiatives and expanding virtual learning opportunities.

 

Both  candidates have taken a stand on three issues in particular aimed at promoting  college affordability and accessibility:

 

Federal Pell Grants. McCain encourages  incremental increases in federal Pell Grant awards that would better keep up  with the rising cost of a college education. Both he and Obama supported the  College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, which raised the maximum Pell  Grant award from $4,050 to $5,400.

 

Federal student loans. McCain backs the  expansion of the Federal Family Education Loan Program, which provides federal  subsidies to private lenders that offer government-backed parent and student  loans as a third-party provider. Obama wants to eliminate the FFEL program and  its subsidies, directing borrowers instead to the government’s Direct Loan  Program, in which families take out their federal college loans directly from the  Department of Education and which he maintains is less costly for taxpayers  than the FFEL program.

 

Public service programs. McCain  supports an expansion of the Teach for America program, which places college  graduates in low-income school districts across the country, under an  accelerated teacher-certification process. Obama has put forth the idea of an  American Opportunity Tax Credit, which would give students a $4,000 tax credit  toward a college education at a public college or university in exchange for  100 hours of public service. Obama also calls for an expansion of the Peace  Corps and AmeriCorps community service programs.

 

Obama Leading McCain in the Charge to Win  Over Youth Vote

With the  general election only two months away, the candidates have little time left to  get the word out to students that they care about the issues young Americans  are facing. And up to this point, Obama has clearly made more of a direct  effort than McCain to specifically target college students and other young  adults.

 

Between  Feb. 1 and July 31, Obama held 32 campaign events in college towns; McCain held  three. And the McCain campaign has yet to publicly announce an official youth  outreach or youth vote campaign director. Obama, on the other hand, has hired  former Rock the Vote political director Hans Reimer. Polls show Obama leading  McCain among young voters by 20 percent.

 

“Obama  has enjoyed impressive support from young people since entering the race, and  the chances of his throngs of voters inexplicably switching their allegiance  are about as good as McCain creating his own Second Life avatar,” Kroll writes.

 

While  young Republicans have complained that McCain hasn’t done enough to reach out  to the voters of Generation Y, the senator’s young supporters haven’t given up  hope.

 

Justin  York, a grassroots youth organizer for McCain in Florida and a junior at the  University of Central Florida, points out that Ronald Reagan, nearly McCain’s  age in 1984, won the majority of youth voters in his re-election bid and that  the first President Bush, at the age of 64, also captured the majority of youth  voters just four years later.

 

If McCain “can chip away at Obama’s commanding lead  among those 50 million young voters,” Kroll says, “it could mean the difference  between the slimmest of victories or a significant loss.”