Pass this bill. The President has made that a rallying call, compared to “Yes We Can” from the campaign three years ago. College students were a major part of his campaign in 2008, which begs the question: does President Obama’s American Jobs Act deliver?
The short answer: Yes. The long answer: Not really.
I sat down to write an article about how great the American Jobs Act was for college students. I recalled walking through campus after polls closed and the votes were projected, and I heard people screaming from their dorm windows “Obama, Obama!” I wanted to write about how the man we rushed to the White House remembered us, gave us some hidden treasures to help us out.
But the harsh reality is that though it is better than the alternative it isn’t something to stop writing home for money about. Three years after college students carried Obama to office, he returned with a lot of help for everyone, and not a lot of help for us. Pass this bill for your graduated family members and friends, because this bill contains benefits for veterans, people who have collected unemployment for six months and people in community colleges. Sadly, benefits for university students are lukewarm.
But then again, a rising tide lifts all boats.
For the people who have read the above in confusion, President Obama recently introduced the American Jobs Act, his prescription for an ailing economy. The bill calls for a lot of measures for economic restoration and is coupled with his deficit reduction plan to give that pill to America without running up the debt. President Obama, in his proposal of the American Jobs Act said the purpose was simple: putting money back in the pockets of America’s workforce.
Any newspaper can expound on the relative merits of the American Jobs Act on businesses, the deficit and politics. HerCampus™ WMU offers a different perspective: how college life, the average college student and higher education as a whole are changed by the measures posed in the Act. This President, more than any other, has been carried to office on a wave of young adults; let’s see what he gave us in return for our time, our donations and our votes.
The obvious change is in our jobs. The American Jobs Act is all about employment, and employment is the name of the game for struggling college students. A study by Steven Levitt of Freakonomics reports that in recessions, unemployment among women is actually lower than that among men, and the losses in pay are about even for both, meaning that women fair slightly better than men in times of hardship overall.
The Act encourages businesses to employ more people with tax incentives, and according to Levitt’s findings employ more women, particularly for those who have spent six months or more looking for a job or have served in America’s armed forces. Also, the act changes incentives to businesses when it comes to laying employees off, making reducing hours (a program called “Job sharing”) a more practical choice; this helps students considerably as many student schedules lend themselves to part-time work.
But infrastructure projects do more than provide jobs. One of them, the Community College Modernization project, will help change campuses around the country. While research universities like Western are excluded, renovation money is available for junior colleges or four-year institutions that issue a “significant” number of non-Bachelor’s or professional degrees. Not only does this improve the quality of the cheaper alternatives to spending Freshman and Sophomore years at a university, but it will require that those universities attract money for the same causes in order to stay competitive.
This free-market style competition between the cheaper institutions covered in this Act and the more prestigious research universities has done, to this point, not a whole lot to manage quality or price. However, with the Act making it easier for those community colleges to renovate, become more energy-efficient, and modernize their educational technologies, perhaps the universities and other institutions not covered. But there’s a problem; given the past of the free-market relationship between community colleges and universities, there can’t be a reasonable expectation of real competition between the two.
The other project that has an effect on students is, perhaps, one of the most ambitious tasks since the Interstate Highway system: the National Wireless Initiative. The idea, according to a presentation by Treasury Secretary Geithner, is to create a nation-wide network of cellular signal that is “true” 4G; faster than anything seen on even the best phone networks today. Not only would this provide jobs for the builders of infrastructure, but it would provide a platform to increase internet integration in phones which would be great for future commercial cell phone apps.
[pagebreak]Okay, so maybe being able to download Angry Birds faster isn’t really helpful in finding a job, but it can really help in making abstract complicated ideas something that can actually be implemented in a cell phone app. That could be really helpful and would have long-lasting benefits to the economy. Also, it would improve the speed and ease of communication across the country. America hasn’t even rolled out a plan this ambitious in regards to internet service.
Student loan forgiveness surely benefits students, though. Of course, though the President advocates for loan forgiveness it isn’t a part of the American Jobs Act, and while it might be good for us, Levitt argues it would certainly be bad for the economy overall. In a recent article on Freakonomics, Levitt reminds readers that forgiving student debt helps those who already have finished classes and have advanced degrees. Since the people living paycheck-to-paycheck are more likely to be in college than those who’ve finished it, Levitt argues that the money isn’t being distributed in the proper way. He calls it the “worst idea ever”.
So what are we left with? A rising tide lifts all boats. The more that’s done for others, the better off everyone is. So maybe the President isn’t thinking of appealing to the people who put money is his pockets and votes in his ballot box, but he is trying to fix a lot of problems. Maybe it’s a good thing he’s not using college students to play politics on this. But the fact remains that universities are specifically excluded from modernization funding, loan forgiveness doesn’t really help us as much as it does those farther along in education than ourselves and benefits tailored to us don’t really exist.
But it’s a good bill. Pass it. So long as things don’t get worse, we can at least hold our heads high and know that things get better. Things don’t have to fall apart. And what’s the alternative? The Republican leaders are holding with old ideas of deregulation and tax cuts, old ideas that are not made for the situation. Obamajobs fits and idea to our situation, the GOP plan fits the situation to their idea. Abraham Lincoln famously said, “The dogmas of our quiet past are inadequate in the stormy present.” I don’t know if the statement has ever been truer.
So, yeah. Pass this bill. There are a lot of good reasons to do it. But don’t get done demonstrating, marching, writing letters and voting, because people are still not fighting for you, the college population, seriously. And I believe wholeheartedly that this is the stormy present.
Editor: Helena Witzke