By Matthew Stoss
This week a group of students—all millennials—forced the president of a major state university to resign.
“You have probably followed what happened at the University of Missouri,” said Aaron Smith—the co-founder and senior strategic advisor of Young Invincibles, a millennial-focused research and advocacy organization—on Tuesday evening during a roundtable discussion hosted by the Washington Post. “I think students are sometimes surprised by how much power they have to affect issues.”
Perhaps no longer.
Mr. Smith and five other experts in fields ranging from education, journalism and politics met for two 30-minute panels at the Elliott School of International Affairs to discuss millennials’ impact on politics, specifically women’s issues (reproductive rights, equal pay) and student debt.
The discussion also veered into gender equality, political engagement, the power of social media and the cost of education during the “New Kids on the Bloc” event, which parsed the voting power of millennials, the group of 83.1 million Americans born between 1982 and 2000.
“Just by numbers alone, we can collectively [be] the difference—and be equal in what’s happening—at the ballot box,” said Ashley Spillane, B.A. ’06, president of Rock the Vote.
Millennials, the most diverse and educated generation in U.S. history, now outnumber baby boomers by nearly 10 million, according to 2015 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and millennial issues are beginning to affect policy.
At Missouri, for example, President Tim Wolfe resigned Monday following student protests over a perceived inadequate response by university leadership to racial tension on campus. Presidential candidates in both parties have addressed the student-debt crisis, while the problem of gender discrimination has become mainstream, thanks, according to Jess McIntosh, to a generation of men who grew up in households with breadwinning women.
“These guys know that what their wife makes is going to affect them,” said Ms. McIntosh, the vice president for communications at EMILY’s List, a group dedicated to getting pro-choice Democratic women elected to public office. “And if she is discriminated against, that is going to affect the family. And the same way that it affects the family, it affects the country when we discriminate against half of our work force.”
The panelists attributed the push on these issues to millennials. They comprise the first generation who, for the most part, never lived in a sans-Internet world, and that, some panelists said, is the key to their reach. Social-media proficiency, specifically, has fueled youth-started movements, like Black Lives Matter, and those movements are starting to force changes, despite operating largely outside of the traditional political system.
Katie Packer—the president of Burning Glass Strategies, a consultant group dedicated to helping its clients reach women voters—said millennials are repelled by excessively partisan politics.
“Republicans are talking to Republicans,” Ms. Packer said. “They’re going back home; they’re talking to people that already believe the way they believe. Democrats are doing the same thing.”
For millennials, student debt is a uniting cause. Graduates get out of college with, on average, nearly $30,000 in loans. Katie McDonough, a political reporter at Fusion.net, pointed out that millennials aren’t buying cars or homes because they’re financially scuttled before their adult lives even start. She also said these problems are seldom addressed in real terms.
“We tend to talk about student debt as this abstract problem,” Ms. McDonough said. “But I think the way most young people experience it is very much in their day-to-day.”
The student-debt problem, one panelist said, is systemic.
Andrew Kelly—resident scholar and director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute—said we need to pay more attention to what’s causing student debt. He said that instead talking about shifting who pays, we should talk about why we pay. Debt, he said, is a symptom.
“Where the problem really lies, for me,” Mr. Kelly said, “is that we have a system of policies, particularly at the federal level, that gives colleges every incentive to enroll students and then give them every incentive to spend lavishly to attract those students and much less reason worry about how much they charge or what happens to the students after they graduate.”
Mr. Kelly said colleges should be less opaque about where tuition money goes, which is something Mr. Smith agreed with, noting that universities, increasingly run like corporations, are spending more on things that could be viewed as nonessential to matriculation, things like lazy rivers and rock-climbing walls. Then there’s just plain greed.
“We’ve seen a huge number of students who’ve really been taken advantage by schools that are just looking to get those loan dollars, just looking to get those grant dollars and don’t really care what happens to the student,” Mr. Smith said. “And now, we’re sort of facing the consequences of that.”