Student debt is a crushing burden on young people, one that other countries simply don't allow. While student debt could be cancelled, we must realize that student debt is only a reality because our state legislature underfunds public colleges.
Special guest Timmy Sullivan joins us from PHENOM to talk about public higher ed here in Massachusetts and the history of our state government leaving us all behind. Don't miss the story of how the Cherish Act died in a committee where 2/3 of the committee members co-sponsored the bill!
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. You can watch this episode on YouTube.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast (https://incorruptible-mass.buzzsprout...)
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
Student debt is a crushing burden on young people, one that other countries simply don't allow. While student debt could be cancelled, we must realize that student debt is only a reality because our state legislature underfunds public colleges.
Special guest Timmy Sullivan joins us from PHENOM to talk about public higher ed here in Massachusetts and the history of our state government leaving us all behind. Don't miss the story of how the Cherish Act died in a committee where 2/3 of the committee members co-sponsored the bill!
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. You can watch this episode on YouTube.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast (https://incorruptible-mass.buzzsprout...)
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Last edits were made on 6/16/2021 by AH and on 6/17/2021 @ 1430ET by FL.]
Anna Callahan 0:03
Hi, there, you are listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics. So we investigate why it is so broken, we imagine what we could have here in our lives if we fixed it, and we report on how you can get involved. And today, we have another special guest super excited about this conversation about higher-ed funding. But first, I will let our inimitable regulars introduce themselves. Jonathan Cohn!
Jonathan Cohn 0:34
Jonathan Cohn, I'm in Boston, although I'm currently in Cambridge right now. But a progressive activist who's been involved in an issue in electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts for the past eight years.
Anna Callahan 0:48
And Jordan Berg Powers,
Jordan Berg Powers 0:48
Jordan Berg Powers. I've come here-- I use he/him, I'm here from Worcester. And I have 13 years experience in Massachusetts politics, although it feels much longer!
Anna Callahan 0:51
It feels longer! [laughing]
Jordan Berg Powers 0:56
It feels much longer!
Anna Callahan 1:04
And I am Anna Callahan. I ran for state rep and am involved in other state politics things. And she/her is what I go by. And we are excited to introduce Timmy Sullivan, who works with PHENOM. And Timmy, if you would just introduce yourself and a little bit about PHENOM and what you do.
Timmy Sullivan 1:23
Thank you so much for having me. My name is Timmy Sullivan, he/him/his. I am located in the Pioneer Valley, where I've lived for five years in this beautiful stretch of Western Massachusetts. And I'm the executive director of PHENOM, which is the Public Higher Education Network Of Massachusetts. PHENOM has been a real leader in higher-ed conversations for the better part of a decade and a half. In Massachusetts, we bring together stakeholders, and we're founded by stakeholders and public higher education so that's students, faculty, workers, community members-- really anyone who cares about guaranteeing everyone's state's right to a public education, and we understand public education to include our public higher education system. So we've done a lot of work over that time in sort of shaping the conversation in the state, advancing some pieces of legislation that will increase folks access to higher-ed, and are really excited to be joining you all in bringing this conversation to the table.
Anna Callahan 2:27
Great. I want just one or two sentences from Jordan and from Jonathan about how do you think we're doing in Massachusetts around higher education?
Jordan Berg Powers 2:37
[laughing] It is like our public education system. We underfund it, we promise voters, you know, elected officials promise voters that they care about our kids, but we fund it like it's one of our least-- I don't want to say least-- but it's one of the many priorities we don't really put our efforts into. We have the ability to have a world class system. We certainly have the wealth to a world class system. And I would argue it's the engine for which Massachusett's economy, but more importantly, I would say the things that attract people to the state is our education system, and we don't fund it like it is.
Anna Callahan 3:14
Jonathan?
Jonathan Cohn 3:16
Basically ditto what Jordan says, that mainly that the-- particular with the past two decades, Massachusetts has done a lot of disinvesting from public higher education and [INAUDIBLE]. If the costs are largely the same, which in some ways they have probably gone up. But if they're largely the same and the state's money comes away, somebody has to pay, and that's increasingly becoming students.
Anna Callahan 3:40
Yeah, I mean, with the huge conversation nationally around student debt around that this unbelievable amount of student debt that we have, and how crushing it is for younger people, but increasingly, not even young people. There are people who are retiring now, and they still haven't paid off their student debt from 20 years ago. The conversations around canceling student debt have appeared to collapse at the national level. And Timmy, I loved what you said about student debt and its relationship to state legislatures funding higher education.
Timmy Sullivan 4:22
Yeah, for sure. So it's really incredible to see this large national conversation about canceling student debt, this bottom up stimulus, which of course has PHENOM's support because it will put money back in people's pockets, which now more than ever is needed. This is an enormous financial crisis that is going to burst at some point. We have $1.7 trillion dollars of student debt-- 44 million Americans burdened with this. And there's also a moral argument here of should there be such a thing as student debt? The fact that that that term exists is ridiculous that we accept something as such. But what I try to remind folks of when we're having this national conversation is that, sure, Joe Biden can, with the stroke of a pen, cancel our debts. But that ticker is going to start right over again if there is not robust reinvestment in our public education system. Folks are still going to accrue student debt for being enrolled in education. So it's really important while we're having this national conversation about canceling the debt, to remember that, locally, our debts are manufactured, that our state legislatures in the context of Massachusetts-- the Massachusetts State Legislature is the manufacturer of our student debts here. And this crisis of student debt is actually really acutely felt for us here in Massachusetts. We, as you know, Jordan, and Jonathan had mentioned, over the last two decades have severely disinvested public money from public schooling, such to the extent that in 2004, Massachusetts had the second lowest average student debt total in the entire country, we ranked 49th for average student debt.
Jordan Berg Powers 6:13
Good, rate, though.
Timmy Sullivan 6:15
No, that's a good rate. We're at the bottom we are like nationally, ranking second, second, lowest for debts. But in 16 years, we accelerated to have the fastest growing student debt average, and now are the 10th highest. So we've jumped from 49 to 10th, in a matter of 16, short years, because of state disinvestment. Now, three in every four public school graduates in Massachusetts has student debt, and actually diverging from national trends, we have a public college debt problem in Massachusetts, because we have more students graduating from public colleges into student debt. So more public graduates have debt than private graduates in Massachusetts, and the raw numbers of student debt totals for public graduates is almost on par with what private graduates have for debt totals. So the fact that student debt in Massachusetts is disproportionately a public college problem should snap us away to the reality that we have strayed so far from resembling anything close to a public school system.
Anna Callahan 7:19
That's crazy when we've got MIT, Harvard. I mean, we have the best schools in the country or in the world. And to think -private schools- and to think that our public school debt is approaching that is just-- that's totally crazy.
Jonathan Cohn 7:36
Just quick point that I think it's an interesting thing, just for perspective on this isn't an activity, we're talking about 2004, as well, as we're talking about some of the past two decades, as well as a think of somebody who's just about to head into the UMass system this fall, what that picture was like for investment in debt when they were born, versus when they go to college, and how how much that has changed.
Timmy Sullivan 7:59
Yeah, so for when a student who's about to enroll, in the UMass system was born, they would be paying-- well, actually, and now I want to figure out the math-- right now they're paying about double what they would have been paying if they enrolled when they were born. That's an easier way for me to calculate the figure in my brain.
Jonathan Cohn 8:19
[deadpans] They should've enrolled as babies.
Timmy Sullivan 8:20
[laughing] They should have enrolled as babies. Over the span of their lifetime of incoming freshmen, what they're expected to contribute personally out of pocket, and more often than not, with debt financing, because we can't afford to pay out of pocket tens of thousands of dollars every year, students are expected to pay double and what has really caused that is a disinvestment trend from the state legislature. As money is being pulled out of our public school system, our public schools need to figure out where the money is going to come from. And one of those strategies, you know, famously devised by Reagan a couple decades ago when he was governor of California, was to have students and families be the financers of a public education, which effectively privatizes our whole system of public education. Then more than half of the budget for a UMass system is coming from students paying for-- not from the legislature. So we have a public system in name only, but one that is majority privately financed. And this is why we have such an incredible debt burden as well because it is unconscionable to be asking people to pay this much money for what is a public education every year. You cannot work a part time job-- some students are working multiple jobs, and they're still not able to finance their education. We have students who are working multiple jobs and skipping meals and they're still going into debt financing for their education. We have an absolute crisis in higher-ed and this is all because of state disinvestment, and it can be resolved so easily with state reinvestment, of just putting public financing back into our public goods.
Jordan Berg Powers 10:11
And, to put the finer point on it, so when I was born, Reagan is president and beginning his first term. A lot of the time, older folks, they'll say, "Oh, I paid for it," but it was, even with room and board, the average cost was $7,000. But it was $42,000 when I graduated from college. it's just so it's just not even I think it's hard for people to really understand that that's not a little bit of money, right? $120,000 versus $28,000 is a lot of difference. That's a house in between! That's a lifetime, especially when you accrue interest, which is the other part of it: A lot of [older folks] didn't accrue interest on those loans. They paid those loans outright, or with minimal interest, but [our generation,] we're put into a private marketplace where those interest rates very often. The government has a floor, not a ceiling, so there's a lot of taking money off the top from private corporations. So they first de-invest, and then they literally take the money out of my pocket and give it to investors and give it to people who are already rich and make them even richer through servicing something that should not have cost a house. And that was when I was-- and I'm old, right? I am an old millennial-- there are young people going into the college system who wished they pay what I pay.
Anna Callahan 12:00
Yeah
Timmy Sullivan 12:00
I think so what you're saying, with respect to like my mom's story, which is one that I tell sometimes, because you can see the disparity just within one generation, and my mom had me while she was young, too, so there's not even a whole lot of difference here generationally between her and I, but she went to UMass Boston in the early 90s. And my mom does not have student debt. My mom was the first in her entire family to go to college, from a low income family, a single mother, raising a son, and got the opportunity to be this first gen low income single mother student at UMass Boston, and become a nurse and help our family have economic mobility, provide the opportunity for her four sons to go on and get college educations. And we have student debt, but this was an opportunity that my mom had, because at that time, the state invested in students, and they made it possible for people like my mom to go and get an education. And I'm struck with the fact that now like, if my mom was just in my situation only two decades later, she probably would not have gone on to be able to get the degree that she did, or if she was able to, it probably would have taken her a lot longer, she would still be paying it off, she would have to be working multiple jobs and have either debts to banks and the government or interpersonal debts, which is another way that some folks finance this-- within their families, they're borrowing money. So even the student debt figure that we see nationally at $1.7 trillion, what is hidden in some of that is these interpersonal debts that people are taking on. That's really terrifying that this has happened so quickly, and that we also accept this with such complacency as sort of a new normal.
Anna Callahan 13:55
Yeah I love the way that you sort of paint this as a problem with the state legislatures that the whole existence of student debt for public college is something that these state legislatures and our state legislature have created. And I heard this amazing story from you that I would love to highlight, which is that the Cherish Act, and I'd love for you to say exactly what that act would have done, it got killed and a committee where almost two thirds of the members of the committee were cosponsors of the bill, official, official cosponsors of the bill, and I would love to hear that story from you.
Timmy Sullivan 14:38
Yeah, so this is two years ago, in 2019. So in that legislative session, the Cherish Act, which is a bill that addresses one part of the problem of funding with higher education, so it will basically revert the state spending on public higher education back to the 2001 per-pupil spending. And so 2001 is the year that we all are using as when the crisis of disinvestment really started. So this bill will revert us back to 2001 per-pupil spending figures into the public higher education system. And in 2019, in the committee, the higher ed Committee, which was presiding over the Cherish Act, eleven out of the seventeen committee members, so 64%, basically two thirds, but nonetheless, a majority of the committee were cosponsors of this bill, yet it did not leave the committee, it stayed for the session in the committee, and this is still a piece of legislation that we're holding now, in this session, public hearings about, having to do cosponsorship drives, convince legislators that this is something that's needed.
Anna Callahan 15:55
And how useful is that cosponsorship drive? [laughs]
Timmy Sullivan 15:58
Yeah, well...
Anna Callahan 15:59
When you get the co-sponsors, and then they won't get it out of committee!
Jonathan Cohn 16:03
To say like, expecting that a majority support should mean something, as well as expecting that people who are cosponsoring your bill should actually do something for a new thing.
Timmy Sullivan 16:15
So that's quite demoralizing to see that we can have nominally a majority of folks presiding over a piece of legislation purport to care about it, but then actually not do the work that moves it forward.
Anna Callahan 16:32
So what do legislators say, when you guys are there asking, do you receive a similar story from all these legislators? When you're asking for more money for higher-ed, what do you hear?
Timmy Sullivan 16:44
So it really depends, there are some legislators who totally get it. We have real champions, so I want to shout out Representative Higgins and Senator Eldridge who are, you know, filing and really championing a piece of legislation near and dear to PHENOM, which is the Debt-free Future Act or an Act to guarantee debt free public higher education which is H.1339, this would make public higher education free for all residents of the Commonwealth and give extra grant money to low income students.
Sound effects Anna 17:19
Yay!!!!
Timmy Sullivan 17:22
So this is incredible. And if we are able to pass a bill like the Debt-free Future Act, we can see Massachusetts in the headlines, not for having the fastest growing totals of student debt, but for being the first state in the country to guarantee public education as a right to students in this way. So that's really important and I think we owe it to the champions of this issue who are doing a lot of work to give them that credit. Alternatively, we have a couple of other narratives that legislators love to throw at us. One of them is the classic "How do you pay for it?" for which we have several proposals that could fund it. We have progressive income tax, the millionaire's tax, Fair Share Amendment, which some of the money could go and be used for this. Representative Higgins has also filed an endowment tax bill, which for private colleges that have endowments over $1 billion, the dollars over 1 billion, so your billion and first dollar gets taxed at 2.5%-- incredible, on these institutions, such as Harvard that have $40 billion endowments, which grew by $1 billion over the course of the pandemic, while students were dropping out of college taking on debt totals, debt financing, going into hunger and being evicted, and Harvard is profiting $1 billion-- it would tax this sort of money to be able to fully subsidize. This tax would more than cover what we need to make tuition free in Massachusetts, which is phenomenal. You got some legislators also who tell us that our state systems have too much money already, which is hard to hear as a student debter myself of previously as a public college student, because it is the disinvestment of the legislature that has produced the conditions by which students have to go into debt. So to have these sort of false narratives that look at the increasing bureaucratization of public higher-ed, it hurts when we know that students are having to take on debt totals and we know that faculty are suffering layoffs. They're not afforded tenure track opportunities, the adjunctification and underpaying and over reliance on grad students, is really a hard reality to par with what legislators are pretending is the reality for state financing of public schools.
Jordan Berg Powers 20:01
Yeah, I just want to talk about the like Uberfication. And, the way in which because I think the other side of this that people miss, but I see and I really didn't understand till I saw it with my wife. So my wife ran a nonprofit, she has a doctorate in education. And she, you know, she started to move towards teaching. And she teaches partially a private and partially a public, if she were to, you know, she does not have a track towards tenure, that thing that we think of that sort of, you know, they often say like, oh, all these professors, they'll fix- universities are not doing that anymore, they aren't giving people opportunities to have a pay of a regular job, where it pays you regularly, and you're on track to having some security. What they're going towards are models where they bring in people who are themselves burdened by debt that they will never pay, right. We will die with my wife's student loan debt, we will never pay off the student loan debt. And she is paid so little as an adjunct, it would take her six classes if she had a course load of six classes every semester. And in the summer, the two summer course loads six classes, that's what it would take to get my pay, and I am underpaid. Currently, it's not as a nonprofit person, and I don't have a doctorate, right. So there is, you know, that course load would be insane. And then on top of that, even if she wanted to do it, universities don't promise classes they don't promise, right, it's like, Uber, you get what you you know, what somebody else gives you, their graces with you, you have to,- you're at the mercy of an employer, who can just not give you a class, if they don't like you or not bring you back. And then you're and then you yourself will be hungry, we'll be falling into, you know, economic despair. We don't know what my wife will be teaching this summer, if she gets to teach at all, let alone next fall, where her classes are up in the air because of mismanagement by administrators. So, you know, that sort of like economic, unsurity of where they are what's going on, that's also a part of the disinvestment, right. It's not just that students are suffering, which they are, faculty are also suffering. And these things, you know, it's no longer the days, where being a professor is this great, middle, upper-middle class job, it is, for some it is for people getting tenure, it is for some who are older than us, right, who got on this track when that was still available, but it is less and less so. Every year, and into future generations it will be less and less so. And so, you know, that's really the other piece that's really that's terrible about this whole system. It's just the way it treats people, faculty, and you know, and then the other side of it, and again, students also suffer in that process, though, ask my wife, oh, what is your class? And she'll say, I don't know. I'll say, Can I take your class? She'll say, I don't know. Right? So that ability to build and mentor relationships, is also in the air by this process.
Jonathan Cohn 23:12
Just quickly to build on that you can see the kind of underlying kind of ideological, philosophic undertone, like economic, social economic connection, or political economic connection between viewing your staff as like, quote, independent contractors, so to speak, is that which the adjunctification is doing, as well as views viewing the student body as like consumers or users to be charged the user fee for a public good. And both have reflective of broader trends in the economy if you have that near liberalisation of higher education, where it's not viewed as something that we collectively invest in, but as viewed as a corporation.
Timmy Sullivan 23:53
And on that point, Jonathan, something the UMass Amherst campus witnessed and students were protesting a month ago or so was that the Board of Trustees had just voted to raise tuition on international students for UMass Amherst tuition and did so while also promoting that tuition for in state and out of state students didn't go up and really patting themselves on the back for that. But what you have here is that the increases to the tuition for international students are being used to offset what would have been fee increases for in state out of state students. So we have this game that is going on of how to have students be the offsetters of cost between each other, when really what we should be looking for, for financing is just from the state legislature. But instead we are creating like you're saying all of these games that have who can be consumers, what our revenue streams that we can get, this really privatized model of consumption and delivery versus what this ought to be, which is just learning.
Jordan Berg Powers 25:00
It's you know, you create a, I just want to go quickly, create a managerial class, right? So you create this class of people who, again, are political appointees, they're not people with expertise. They're not people who got doctorates at these universities. These are people who happen to know the right people. And then they not only bloat their own salaries, they bloat the managerial staff underneath them, which is loyal, which grows, which sort of, you know, comes at a cost. So you get this system in place, where then they go back to the legislators and say, like, yeah, it's like those students, and those professors will figure out how to make it, they are become a part of the liberalisation, you know, the way in which our universities become a part of that model, right? The same way, Uber acts, or Grubhub, or all of these things, extract their dollars from regular workers from the people who do the hard work from the small businesses, that they literally steal money from and extract it out of the system and put it towards the top. So that same system is happening in our public education system, and it does not need to be this way. It does not need to be this way.
Anna Callahan 26:05
It does not. So, I firmly believe the electorate in Massachusetts is in favor of lowering this ridiculous student debt that we have here in Massachusetts and across the country. This is this is not a controversial issue, this is not an issue that the people aren't behind. And yet our state legislature can't seem to make it happen. So I just want to paint a little picture here of what could we have we we could be the first state, as you mentioned, to me to really guarantee higher education for all of our residents, which you know, how many countries in Europe and other places in the world already do this and have done it for decades. We could be that domino, causing all the other states to do something similar. Any other ideas of what we could really have here in Massachusetts?
Jordan Berg Powers 27:10
I mean, sadly, Europe is going the direction of, or at least England is going in the direction of America. But what I got my master's degree in England for $3,000, because I applied abroad, because I didn't want to take on more student debt in America. So as a foreign student, if I were a student there, I would have gotten in for free. But I paid an international fee of three, the equivalent of $30,000 to get my master's degree in London. Imagine that, imagine if we went back to that, the 70s, the 60s where you could where, you know, you were, like higher education for international students accrued a small fee. Right, and everyone else was free, that's should be our model. It's critical to where we're going. It's critical to the sort of, to the sort of society we're building. And you know, there's no reason it need not be available for everyone. We'd have the wealth in the state.
Anna Callahan 28:07
Absolutely. Thank you so much, everybody. This was really amazing. And, Timmy, last final last words, is there anything that people can do to help with the legislation you're currently pushing?
Timmy Sullivan 28:21
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first and foremost is to get in touch with your state legislators. Find out who is your state rep and your state senator foenum is asking you to encourage them to publicly commit to vote yes on the debt free future act. That's House Bill 1339. This is a crucial step. The other way is to get in touch with Phenom directly we are on social media, Twitter and Instagram @MassPhenom. You could reach out to me Timmy at phenomonline.org our website, Phenomonline.org but being involved is critical. You know, we've talked a lot about disinvestment here. And what we mean by disinvestment is is austerity. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has this phenomenal way of characterizing austerity as public abandonment or organized abandonment. And what's really, you know, helpful in that characterization is that it is only possible for the state legislature, the state legislature to abandon us if we are not actively holding their feet to the fire, if we are not paying attention and are organized, because if we are going to stand up and say, absolutely the hell not, then it is impossible politically for them to disinvest from what is ours. So we really need you all, everyone who is listening to this and your neighbor go knock on their door, to be a part of this reinvestment and this collective vision for what we can have in Massachusetts.
Anna Callahan 29:52
Fantastic. Excellent last Words. Thank you so much. We'll see everybody next week.