This Higher Ed Advocacy Group Wants to Eliminate Student Debt in California

For many in their group, the “real world” isn’t some looming nine-to-five threat, but rather the omnipresent arbiter of whether or not they have the right and ability to pursue an education.

“[People in] the Baby Boomer Generation, they’ll say, ‘Oh I could have just worked in the grocery store over the summer to pay my tuition’,” says Liz Waite, a junior at California State University Long Beach. “Oh, boy, have things changed. This is a survival issue.”

It’s a statement that doesn’t depend upon hyperbole. After wrestling with her financial aid office to get a university tuition grant, Ms. Waite is now able to afford rent (she qualified for a Section 8 voucher, but couldn’t find a landlord that would accept it; Long Beach’s rent hikes in recent years a have been among the steepest in the nation.)

RISE’s Instagram account is filled with students relating stories of multiple-hour commutes, sleeping out of cars, and working 60-hour weeks while taking on a full course load. Many struggle with food insecurity. One-in-ten students in the California State University system is homeless; in a state that possesses the sixth largest economy in the world, 50,000 college kids don’t know where they are going to sleep. And that doesn’t even account for the University of California or community college systems. The number could be as high as 75,000.

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RISE endeavors to let their fellow students, the general public, and—most importantly—legislators know that students working multiple jobs with an ever-present fear of homelessness is about as close to the bone of reality as American life gets. Free tuition is not then some sinecure in the ivory tower; for many of them it’d be protection against life on the street.

The main cause for this oft-desperate situation has been their state’s systematic slashing of subsidized tuition. RISE, which was founded last year by Max Lubin, a 27-year-old former Obama administration appointee and current graduate student at the Goldman School For Public Policy at UC Berkeley, is a direct and student-led advocacy group, formed to combat the state’s drastic cutting of tuition subsidies and, in a perfect world, to try and get lawmakers to come around to the idea of free tuition as a necessary boon to the state of California.

“What I saw at the Department of Education, we would visit schools all over the country, from coal country Kentucky to right here in Oakland, and I kept meeting these students who were doing everything right,” Lubin told VICE Impact. “They were applying to college, getting great grades, working hard in school, and they’d get the bill for what their first semester in school would cost them, and they wouldn’t end up going. It’s striking to me that no matter the extraordinary non-profit organizations and educators, there were so few folks doing advocacy work, doing policy work and political work to make sure that states are investing in higher education.”

Between 2005 to 2015, public universities in California turned away nearly 1 million resident students. The irony is striking: higher high school graduation rates—particularly amongst black, Latino, and other minority students--led to an increase in applications that the university systems didn’t have the resources to handle. Lubin (as well as the college systems themselves) contends that this is because of slashes to funding in the state’s budget, a practice which spiked during the lean days of the recession. Because of cuts, the UC system also increased the percentage of non-resident students—since they pay full, out-of-state tuition.

“Funding for four-year higher education is not mandatory, which means that in any given budget cycle, the legislature is not obligated to spend money [on higher education] the way they do other items,” Lubin said. “This is about students not having the same political muscle in Sacramento that other special interest groups like oil or prison guards’ unions have.”

RISE, then, has set itself up as a potential lobbying group to push student interests. The issue they’ve given primacy to is that of “free tuition,” a catch-all term for various ways to restructure California’s per-student spending: everything from expanding the scope of financial aid to cover living expenses, to “universal access”, which would raise taxes on incomes of $1 million or more, and combine that with existing federal and state financial aid to effectively eliminate tuition from the equation.

This year the thrust of their action is getting gubernatorial candidates to pledge to restore funding for higher education. Of course, the problem with forming a lobbying group for students is a self-inflicted one: they often don’t vote. RISE is seeking to address that by getting them to register or re-register. Deadlines to register are coming up.

“We’ve been hit, because we haven’t been showing up,” says UC Riverside sophomore Emelia Martinez. “We just want to get the conversation started and get students thinking about, if this thing happened, how would it impact you personally. We want to get students to fight for this, because it will actually change our lives.”

Ms. Martinez attends Riverside on scholarship, but she knows that should she get a C in any class, goodbye money, and goodbye college career. Ms. Waite has already taken out loans.

“I struggle with homelessness, and I don’t have a Mom or Dad to back me up,” she said. “I’m a talented, driven person, and if you want me to contribute to this country to my full potential, then you should probably do something about students who are as vulnerable as I am, and how we’re drowning in debt. How are we supposed to start businesses, and gain capital, if we have this chain around our necks?”

It’s a question many students feel they have a right to ask. 2018 is an election year, after all. And tuition might be slated to rise again.

Register to vote if you’re concerned about the high costs associated with getting a college degree and the financial burden of debt that too often comes with that education after graduation. VICE Impact has partnered with TurboVote to get people registered, sign up today to have an effect on tomorrow.