Student debt was top of mind for young voters in the 2020 election. The Andrew Goodman Foundation Executive Director Alexandria Harris joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.
Video Transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: More than 40 million Americans shouldered with student debt now looking to a potential Biden administration for relief. That issue of the student-loan crisis certainly a key one for many young voters who turned out in big numbers on Tuesday.
Let’s bring in Alexandria Harris. She is the Executive Director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation. And Alexandria, good to talk to you today.
Let’s start with that turnout, though, because, you know, when you look at the total, we’re looking at a record turnout nationally, but no question a lot of young voters were motivated by issues that were much different than some of the older voters. How big of an issue was student loans and just debt relief for those who headed to the polls?
ALEXANDRIA GOODMAN: Well, thank you for having me. I’ll tell you, with all the craziness around this election, I’ve told everyone that the big winners were young people and student voters, and they were highly motivated by this question about student debt. Students have gone into debilitating debt just to get education. And then when the president kept saying that the economy’s the best that it’s ever been, I don’t think that it landed well with them because they had all these loans. And then the question is, can they get a job after they graduate?
AARTHI SWAMINATHAN: Hey, Alexandria, so one analysis by Tufts University that specifically looked into the state of Georgia found that 90% of young Black voters chose Biden over– I mean, with a disclaimer that obviously these things are being counted, but what sort of efforts did you guys take into mobilizing these young voters? Did you go into social media? I’m just curious about that.
ALEXANDRIA GOODMAN: Well, Georgia was a major focal for us this year, and we contacted voters across the state. We were text messaging. We were emailing. We helped students and young people cure their ballots if they were rejected. We’re still doing that, actually.
And so our focus was really, really targeted. We also did a lot of voter registration. We were able to text message hundreds of thousands of voters across the state.
ZACK GUZMAN: And when we talk about younger voters, I think that’s pretty important considering the jobs figures we got today shows continued weakness in terms of the employment rate for younger Americans. Students graduating into this. We were talking about that earlier. I do not envy that position at all. It’s going to be a tough job environment to come out into.
But on that front, I mean, how much trickier does that make the conversation around student debt considering these payments are going to be tough to meet without a job?
ALEXANDRIA GOODMAN: It makes it very tricky. You know, right now young people are struggling to find jobs and even internships. And I think that’s compounded by the economy, but COVID makes it really tough. So people are constantly reaching out, young people especially. They lost their student jobs when COVID hit. They were displaced. Their families often lost jobs, and then there was a question about tuition.
So coming out of, you know, graduating and they don’t have a job, it’s going to be really difficult to pay the loans. And then there’s, you know, questions of forbearance and how long that will last, and all this sets them up for a lot of financial difficulty going into their early careerists.
AARTHI SWAMINATHAN: Alexandra, so we’ve kind of had this situation there before with the 2009 crisis when, for instance, a lot of people graduated into a recession, and then their wages were sort of held back. So what can people do differently this time around? What learnings can we take from that experience?
ALEXANDRIA GOODMAN: Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think actually back to my own experience. I graduated from law school in 2007. It was the time of plenty, and jobs were being thrown at us. And then shortly after, the bubble burst and everybody was struggling.
And what I learned from my own experience as a kind of young person at that time was to be really clear to live within my means. And even when you take out loans, be really mindful to not overspend. I think a lot of students when they get their loan checks they think I’m rich. Let me go buy this or that, and it’s just absolutely not true. Be really mindful with whatever lending you receive that you’re going to have to pay it back some day.
So always make sure that you live within your means, that you’re budgeting, that when you’re thinking about your entire portfolio as a young person that you take a job that can support you. And obviously this is kind of a tough one because jobs are so tight. But really thinking about your entire lifecycle and what you want to do.
AKIKO FUJITA: Alexandria, the other thing we saw play out really in the aftermath of the financial crisis is a lot of those students who graduated at the time who couldn’t find jobs ended up going back to school, going back to grad school, going back to law school, which only added to the student debt they had, which they’re now still trying to pay off. How big of a concern is that for you that so many students graduating this year could follow down the same path?
ALEXANDRIA GOODMAN: Yeah. It’s a big concern. So a lot of young people come to me, especially our ambassadors and people in our network, and they ask me because I’m a lawyer, should I go to law school? And that is typically a place that people go when they’re trying to figure out what to do next. And a lot of my colleagues who, you know, I’ve been out of law school, you know, a decade, they’re now thinking, oh my gosh. I still have all this debt. I’m not practicing law. It’s a big burden, you know, what we called golden handcuffs.
So what we are telling people is if you want to go to law school, then go to law school. If you want to go to med school, go to med school. But if you don’t want to go, then you certainly shouldn’t go there and incur all of this debt.
And, you know, a little bit of the elitist in me says, you know, go to the best law school you can go to so that you can get the best job that you can. And even at the top law schools, we’re seeing people are coming out and they can’t get jobs.
So it’s a real risk. It’s a real gamble to say I’ll just go to school hoping that it will afford me a really great job. We’re seeing that’s not necessarily true.
AARTHI SWAMINATHAN: Alexandria, so whoever the president is, it’s going to have big implications for student loans and forgiveness. So what happens next? Are we actually going to see some cancellation?
ALEXANDRIA GOODMAN: I hope so. [LAUGHS] But Lord knows. You know, let me tell you the best thing about students voting in mass numbers. The way that we’re seeing record turnout with student voters means that now we’re really going to hear politicians caring about what young people think, and this issue about cancellation of debt is a really big issue.
But before because students were considered unreliable voters, nobody cared about what students wanted. But this, this record-breaking number is going to make politicians really care about what students say, and I’m hoping that people really adhere to their promises.
AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, no question. Certainly a lot of power in those numbers that we got from Tuesday. Alexandria Harris, the executive director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation. And our very thanks to Aarthi Swaminathan as well for joining in on the conversation.
