After years of covering higher ed philanthropy and funders’ efforts to address financial barriers to entry, I consider myself fortunate to have attended a four-year university at a reasonable cost. I suspect many readers over the age of 40 feel the same way. But something dramatically changed over the past two decades.
For William Moses, the managing director of the Kresge Foundation’s education program, the policy-related factors underlying the fraught state of higher ed can be traced to an inter-generational redefinition of the social compact.
“We have been moving the cost of higher education away from the institution and the government and toward the person and the family,” he said. Preceding generations that viewed higher ed as a public good have ceded the stage to those who believe that “individuals have to pay for it — and that’s a huge shift.”
One way that Kresge seeks to address and even reverse this shift is by giving voice to the students currently bearing the cost of exploding tuition and crushing student loan debt. To build momentum around this goal, the foundation recently announced a suite of grants totaling $1,025,000 to student-centered civic engagement initiatives at five organizations that prioritize low-income and students of color, especially those attending historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), hispanic-serving institutions, and community colleges.
The grants build on Kresge’s work in boosting student engagement over the past decade and arrive less than two years after college students turned out in record numbers in the 2020 election. Pro-democracy funders’ celebration was short-lived, however. In the intervening year and a half, 47 states have proposed 361 measures to restrict ballot access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice voting bills tracker, underscoring the urgency of Kresge’s work.
Each of the foundation’s grantees “contribute to an important dimension of advocacy, policy, research and outreach in a time where we are seeing deliberate and systemic attacks on voting rights,” said Kresge Education Fellow Joselin Cisneros. “These barriers make it difficult for students to vote during both presidential and local elections, rolling back the progress many civic rights leaders and organizations have achieved with increased registration and voting by students.”
“Their issues will become more prominent”
Moses traced Kresge’s support for student-centered civic initiatives back to 2012 when it provided a grant to Young Invincibles, an organization that was formed in 2009 to amplify young people’s voices in the debate over healthcare reform. (“Young invincibles” is an insurance industry term to describe people between 18 and 29 who forgo health insurance because they perceive themselves as, well, invincible.)
After the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, the organization branched out to other areas like civic engagement and college affordability. In 2017, Kresge gave Young Invincibles $200,000. It was around this time that the foundation began ramping up its support to other organizations focused on engagement, with an emphasis on students attending community colleges and minority-serving institutions (MSIs).
“The genesis of this work is the idea that we want to hear the voices of students,” Moses said. “By voting, their issues will become more prominent among policymakers. Whereas if they don’t vote, their issues are just not as important.” Moses cited Tufts University research showing that the top concerns for people between the ages of 18 and 34 include the cost of college, student debt and climate change.
Other organizations focused on student engagement that received Kresge support over the last few years include the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing and Campus Vote Project.
Overview of select grantees
The five recipients of Kresge’s recent round of support are Civic Nation (Washington, D.C.), Fair Elections (Washington, D.C.), Jolt Initiative (Austin), the Andrew Goodman Foundation (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey), and the Tufts University Institute for Democracy and Higher Education (Boston).
Moses explained that Tufts has become the go-to source for college student engagement and voting data. For example, last October, the university’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education (IDHE) found that college student voting increased by 14 percentage points to 66%, in the 2020 elections. The jump outpaced that of all Americans, which jumped six percentage points from 61% to 67%, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“That students, often younger and first-time voters, turned out at rates commensurate with the general public is nothing short of stunning,” said IDHE Director Nancy Thomas.
Moses also cited the work of Civic Nation, which works with a vast network of national partners. One of Civic Nation’s programs is the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a national, nonpartisan initiative that supports colleges and universities working to improve civic learning, political engagement, and voter participation. The organization has received support from the Democracy Fund, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, which, as it turns out, just issued a call for concepts to colleges and universities exploring curricular projects in civic engagement and voting rights, among other areas.
Another Kresge grantee, Jolt Initiative, is committed to increasing the civic participation of Texas Latinos. Its funders include the Novo Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and the Libra Foundation. Kresge’s grants are being funded through a cross-foundation effort led by its Education Program in partnership with its Arts and Culture and Detroit programs.
“Systemic attacks on voting rights”
The efforts of Kresge and other civic-minded funders made me wonder if we’d be grappling with runaway tuition and debt if students and young graduates had been a more organized and formidable voting bloc over the past 20 years. Just compare this demographic with, say, seniors. Every time a politician makes even a faint suggestion that we should revisit Social Security benefits, all hell breaks loose. If young voters had even half of that kind of electoral clout, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.
We’ll never know if a more organized movement of college students could have maintained robust public support for state institutions, but at the very least, the current state of affairs suggests that politicians have typically written off this demographic. Every four years, commentators predicted a “youth wave” that never materialized — until 2020.
When I first came across IDHE’s data on student voting rates in the last election, I thought it was yet another manifestation of the “Trump bump” that galvanized significant funder support in fields like journalism and public media. But IDHE Director Thomas attributed the surge in young and first-time voters to factors like “student activism on issues such as racial injustice, global climate change, and voter suppression, as well as increased efforts by educators to reach students and connect them to the issues and to voting resources.”
This idea that educators are doing a better job at engaging and organizing students aligns with what Moses is seeing on the ground. He noted that Washington Monthly lists America’s best colleges for student voting as part of its 2021 College Guide and Rankings. “If you just look at the report, you’ll see Ivy League schools and community colleges and HBCUs and MSIs—all kinds of colleges that have chosen to do this work,” Moses said. “It’s something that’s happening all over the map, which is very encouraging.” (Kresge has provided funding to Washington Monthly in support of its college guide and rankings.)
With the critical 2022 midterms approaching, Kresge’s initiative aims to ensure that 2020’s turnout wasn’t a one-time blip. But it also views its support as a financial bulwark against the proliferation of legislation that threatens to restrict college students’ access to the ballot box. “In state capitals across the country, voting rights are under attack via voter restriction laws and unnecessary registration hurdles,” reads Kresge’s press release. “Advocates assert that these new alterations to voting laws directly threaten to suppress the vote of people of color, the elderly, people with disabilities and college students—all groups traditionally targeted by voter suppression.”
Redefining the social compact
Moses grew up in Alaska and attended college in California. He talked about how his stepmother, who’s in her 70s, attended UCLA for free as a California resident. That generation believed that “we need to provide educational opportunities because it’s good for the country, the community, and the state,” he said. Now, the cost per academic year at UCLA for an in-state resident is an astonishing $37,000 and change.
And yet, for all of higher ed’s problems, Moses maintained that college graduates still have lower unemployment rates, live longer, make more money, and are more likely to vote when compared to those who do not attend. “There may be better options in terms of going to a public institution or a community college over a more expensive private school, and it’s certainly better to go to a nonprofit college instead of a for-profit one,” he said. “Nevertheless, in almost every circumstance, the college degree is worth it to the student and the family.”
By amplifying the concerns of students, Kresge’s new engagement initiative seeks to galvanize a long-overdue redefinition of the social compact. “We think it’s important to look at the concerns of this generation of people, which will be different from people who are retired or those who are in their early 40s,” he said. “They have different priorities about what society needs to focus on, and we want to make sure their voices are heard.”