College

Many of the previous posts I've shared here at The Next Right focus on reaching out to win over young voters. However, in my hometown of Pittsburgh, recent developments are demonstrating exactly what happens when young voters don’t show up to the polls. As you may know, Pittsburgh’s economy has gone from its reliance upon the steel industry to becoming a world-class hub for high-tech industry, such as robotics, health care, nuclear engineering, and biomedical technology. These advances have been made possible by Pittsburgh’s world-class learning institutions, led by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

However, the government of the City of Pittsburgh, like those of many other cities across the country, has a $16.2 million hole in its 2010 operating budget. Almost immediately after his reelection in November, Democratic Mayor Luke Ravenstahl (disclosure: I worked for Ravenstahl’s opponent) announced his previously undisclosed plan to make up for the missing revenue by imposing a tax on college students within the City of Pittsburgh. The proposed tax will amount to 1% of the student’s yearly tuition, which would translate into approximately $130 for in-state students at the University of Pittsburgh, $230 for out-of-state students at the University of Pittsburgh, and as much as $400 for Carnegie Mellon students.

Of course, the presidents of each of the colleges in Pittsburgh denounced the tax, and as you would expect, so have many students who would be taxed. The Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed some of these students:

Jacob Brown, a University of Pittsburgh student, said he had earned $3,500 this year washing cars.

“I barely scrape by,” he said, adding that his out-of-state tuition is paid by scholarships and loans. The $233 he would have to pay if the tax were enacted “would be the better part of a month of rent,” he said, or a big slice out of his bottom-of-the-barrel food bill.

Ashley Kunkle, a Carlow student, said the tax would cost her $217. That’s close to one month’s payment on the $3,000 a year she pays the school after financial aid. The tax would apply to the total tuition bill regardless of whether it was paid for with scholarships.

“I make approximately $3,500 working two jobs,” she said. That “$217 means that I could abandon the city of Pittsburgh to study at other fine institutions where there is no tuition tax.”

Charles Shull, president of Pitt’s student government board, said he made “negative-$12,000 a year” because he takes out student loans that far exceed what he earns. “I pay rent. I pay property taxes. I pay wage taxes,” he said.

The final vote is set to take place tomorrow (Wednesday, December 2), and five of Pittsburgh’s nine members of city council have come out in favor of the tax. Thus, it seems likely that the tax will pass, despite promises from the universities to sue to invalidate it.

Let this entire debacle serve as a reminder to young voters across the country: this is what you get when you don’t exercise your civic duty to vote. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette highlights this:

The voting districts in student-heavy central Oakland and North Oakland were busy in November 2008, logging participation rates of 48 percent to 70 percent. This year, though, with a mayor’s race at the top of the ballot, one of those same districts saw just 2.3 percent of registered voters come to the polls, while others were in the teens.

Worse, even after the announcement of the tax, student advocacy was almost non-existent, with only 137 students using outreach tools on a website designed to fight the tax:

After the mayor’s 2010 budget address featured the tax, student government leaders from nearly all of the city’s schools gathered at Pitt. CMU’s student government put up a Web site, www.stoptuitiontax.org. As of Wednesday, 2,543 different computer users had visited the site, 108 of those wrote e-mails to City Council, and 29 used it to report that they had called a council member.

Years upon years of a lack of participation by young voters has cemented into many politicians’ minds that they can get away with patently absurd ideas like Ravenstahl’s tuition tax. The only way to change this is for young people to actually show up and vote. If that doesn’t happen, then these young voters have no right to be appalled when they see their own economically struggling city impose its very own tuition tax.

Promoted. My basic philosophy on a good leader: A's hire A's, B's hire C's. Let's hope that the next RNC Chairman is an A that can find A's within CR's and YR's to work for (and provide innovation for) campaigns and parties around the country. -Matt Moon

College Students to the RNC: We Care, Use Us!


by James Barnes and Brandon Hines, The George Washington University College Republicans

Fellow Republicans:  As we enter a fresh new year, it's easy to be discouraged by the battle ahead.  The Obama Administration promises to pursue an agenda of socialist redistribution.  On top of this, the 111th Congress has just convened, and it's the most liberal in our nation's history. Together, this double-headed monster threatens to grow another in the form of a new judiciary.

Sitting in a position we have long been removed from, our first step has been to question what got us here.  We've started to regroup, on Twitter, on the web, and soon by reconsidering who should lead the RNC into 2010 and beyond.  And, through these exercises, we've come up with some basic answers to the question of what got us in trouble.  We've blamed it on our grassroots, our fundraising, our web presence, our message, and a slew of other equally valid reasons, which we promise to overcome in the next election cycle.  We hope to argue, however, that many of these issues boil down to one oft-overlooked component: a focus on engaging and activating the 18-24 demographic —College Republicans. 

As the future of our party and, in many cases, the most passionate advocates for our platform, it is important that the RNC not only reach out and speak the language that we speak and communicate the way that we communicate, but that it engage and empower the youth of the party in helping to win elections. In this vein, the party already has a virtual army of well informed and connected potential activists, who, in many cases, simply haven't been asked to volunteer the resource they have the most of: their time. Though we lack the ability to donate large sums of cash, or the experience needed to run campaigns, we make up for this with cheap labor and an uncanny, even absurd, ability to remain in instantaneous contact with our peers and advocate for what we believe in. It is time for these and other potential resources to stop being overlooked, and for the RNC to directly engage the future of the party.

Consider this: during our organization's deployment by the RNC this year in Ohio, a state never lost by a Republican president, we never met a single student from an Ohio college.  Elsewhere, in 2007, many argue that we lost the Massachusetts special election due entirely to a complete absence of area college students.  Contrastingly, in Georgia's recent runoff, the unusually strong showing of college students from Maine to Texas served to bolster a winning campaign—a notable exception to a troubling rule.  College Republicans exist everywhere.  In this regard, it's very simple; it's not about changing the minds of college students-- it's about activating and empowering the ones who already care.  To our detriment, this is something that Barack Obama knew all too well.   

In the coming years, the promise of victory does not tolerate the prospect of an inactive college demographic.  This is why we, with the support of many of our friends in the young conservative movement, are calling on the next RNC chairman to pledge to directly engage the next chairman of the College Republican National Committee in kick-starting a strong partnership for a radically better next four years.  In this, they should plan for a future that utilizes CR’s in dominating new media, more directly involves college students in party operations, and most importantly, ensures that, in 2010 and beyond, every willing College Republican will be afforded the chance to work for a Republican candidate through a better organized and more broadly utilized College Republican grassroots operation in every state.  On the path to victory, this is an important stop that has the promise to change the future (and the face) of our party for the better.

James Barnes and Brandon Hines are the Political and Public Relations Directors, respectively, of the George Washington University College Republicans and are working to re-engage Republican youth.

USA Today reports on several states restricting in-state tuition rates:

In the past two years, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Oklahoma have refused in-state tuition benefits to students who entered the USA illegally with their parents but grew up and went to school in the state. That represents a reversal from earlier this decade, when 10 states passed laws allowing in-state rates for such students.

You can read the rest of the story, from USA Today, by clicking here.

There has been a swell of applause in the 259 comments on the story’s page, mostly along the lines of “This is great news. Just take a poll on what REAL Americans want to do with the ILLEGAL Alien Immigrants”. You can expect the same knee jerk reaction in the morning from AM pundits and their rabble roused audience.

However, I have to dispute the predictable “conservative” reaction to this news.

The argument being perpetuated in other states has been that in-state tuition should be a benefit reserved for citizens, not simply residents.

However, at least in Texas, the process of proving your in-state residency also proves that you (or your family) are paying property taxes, whether to a landlord or directly to the state. That’s important, since the in-state tuition discount for college and university students comes from the state’s collection of property taxes. Thus, even a family of illegal immigrants is paying into the system from which the benefit of in-state tuition is derived.

Excluding the offspring of anyone, illegal immigrant or otherwise, who’s been paying into the system for years or decades is wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I’m against illegal immigration. But, although we must address the growing and significant problem of illegal immigration, this method is not the way to do it and should be regarded as inept policy by reactionary politicians.