Student urges someone to support public service loan forgiveness in a specific county

 Dear whomever it concerns, 

It’s better when you figure out the name of the person to whom your letter ought to be addressed if you were to actually send it.

My name is _____________ and I wanted to talk to you about the Student Loan Forgiveness for Social Workers. Specifically I would like to talk about the PSLF, which helps public service workers by giving them college loan forgiveness. I want you to push for getting this policy approved for Macon County Students. I believe it is important that social workers and public service workers can get help with their school, as they have gotten their degree to help their community. As we all know, public service workers do not get paid much; teachers, social workers, and anyone who works for the community they are in does not get paid as much as they deserve. 

Why is that? They work overtime, that most of the time they are not even paid extra for their long hours? On top of everything that they work for, they also have to get the money together for their student loans, but students pay the same  This is going to make people not want to go into being a social worker or a public service worker and then we will not have any. We need to help the ones who are helping our community and our society’s future. 

I believe that if we make this policy a reality in Macon County, we will help the Public service workers, and have more help in school, DCFS and all of that. So please, consider this and help with our society’s future. 

Thank You,

_____________

You are suggesting that Macon County provide scholarships for students who, after graduating from local high schools, earn degrees in social work and other forms of public service (teacher education, I suppose), and these scholarships would be modeled on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) policy, which forgives remaining balances on federal direct loans for education if a person who has debt from such loans has made 120 payments on their direct loan while earning an income from a qualified employer (qualified employers are mostly in government, which is why this is a “public service” policy). 

As a federal policy, PSLF is available to all students, including those who reside in Macon County. Is it your intention that the County Board in Macon County (or perhaps the City Government in Decatur) should offer college loans to students from Macon County, and then forgive the balance on those loans if a recipient of such a loan has resided in Macon County and worked for a public entity in Macon County for a total of ten years? 

It’s a very interesting idea: that a body of local government might get into the college lending business, supporting high school graduates and residents in the jurisdiction of the local government to earn university degrees and then stay in the jurisdiction after earning those degrees. Presumably the local government body would work with some sort of coalition of local banks and credit unions, who would set up the lending process and maintain the record-tracking. I could see this being an interesting policy that might help retain talent and innovation in localities that suffer from brain-drain as educated young adults flee the area and move to Chicago or out-of-state. This policy might also help recruit nurses, social workers, school teachers, law enforcement workers, emergency medical services workers, and so forth, if any of those types of occupation were having difficulties recruiting and retaining employees. 

You would certainly want to write a letter with a little more clarity and detail, to help your audience understand what exactly you are suggesting. What you have done well in the letter is convey a sense that many professionals in public service are offering their diligent effort and expertise in the workplace, but they are not enjoying the respect or compensation that would encourage them to continue doing so, and in fact, such work is becoming less attractive.  That point does help persuade your audience that something should be done. You might have explored why offering locally-sourced education loans that are paid back by the county or city governments after a loan recipient has paid back a certain number of times might be a better way of handling the problem compared to something more direct, such as increasing the wages of workers in these areas, or reducing their working hours or caseloads.  I imagine the loans off the opportunity for the local government and local lending institutions to earn some profits from the interest payments as loans are repaid.  It also may improve the opportunities for local households, whereas raising salaries or improving working conditions directly may benefit persons who are not local, who take local jobs and move into the area. 

As you write letters for decision-makers, you must try to be very clear about what you are asking them to do, and explain why they should do what you want them to do. You need to be able to clearly tell them why a particular course of action is the best thing to do. Telling them that a situation needs fixing and giving them a general idea about the problem and types of solutions is fine, as that gets them thinking about a problem, but will probably find it more satisfying to push for very specific things when you do advocacy in the public policy sphere. 

This assignment allows students to write about any sort of policy connected in any way with social welfare services or policies. I want people to write about things that matter to them—I want students to care about the topics the address in these papers.  Do you care about the Public Service Loan Forgiveness policy?  Do you think 120 payments should be made before the remainder of the debt is wiped out? You can write about actual policies or made-up policies or policies that are being proposed but haven't been passed or implemented yet.  I think in this case you could be writing about the actual existing PSLF program, in which case it is unnecessary to ask a local politician to make it apply in a specific area, because it already is a federal program.  If you are using the same name, but imagining some other policy, or if you pretending that the PSLF program hasn't been enacted yet, then you would need to explain more about what it is and what it does. A single sentence that explains that some loans (those coming directly from the federal government) are forgiven eventually if someone had made payments on those loans 120 times. 

Youth aging out of foster care to get tuition waivers

Most foster kids have had a rough start in life. Most of them have been abused or neglected in some way, which is why they are placed in the foster care system. This means that they usually do not have any family members who are able to take care of them or support them either, since this is the first thing looked for when removing children from homes. The kids are forced to pack their bags and leave everything they know behind in order to go live with strangers. This can be very scary for most children, especially those who already have trust issues with adults because of the abuse they experienced as kids. Also, since they have to go through this process many times, they often develop unstable relationships with adults. This is because they are constantly being placed into homes and then being pulled out and placed into new homes over and over again. This process does not allow for the formation of stable relationships, as the kids never get to have reliable people in their lives to bond with.

 Furthermore, the kids switch schools frequently since they are constantly moving. This not only hurts their ability to make friends, but can also severely interfere with their education. When foster kids age out of the system, they are often left with nothing and no one. This is why I am in favor of foster kids receiving free education up to a bachelor’s degree. This would allow them to get on their feet and be able to support themselves more effectively. In the system we have now, they can get up to three years of schooling through the foster care system. While this provides them with a pretty good start, it would be more efficient in the long run to keep them in the system one more year, so they can at least get a bachelor’s degree. This would give them more options and more financial stability than they would have with only an associate degree or certification. 

Supporting these young adults one more year until they receive their bachelor’s degree would reduce the chance of them becoming homeless since they would be more likely to qualify for higher paying jobs. Also, if they do an internship during their schooling, they would gain experience in that field which would help pave the way to gainful employment. They would also be less likely to end up in jail since their lives would have a more positive outlook and clear direction. Currently, by ages 23-24 years old, foster kids are more likely than non-foster kids to be uneducated, unemployed, homeless, pregnant, and criminal. 

The new bills, Senate Bill 2846 and House Bill 5122, would provide tuition fee waivers to those who DCFS has legal responsibility of, current foster kids, those who have recently aged out of foster care, and those who have been adopted out of foster care. This allows young adults who would otherwise be unable to afford higher education a chance to go to college and have a better chance of succeeding in life. To be able to receive the fee waivers, the young adult must have attained a high school degree or a GED, which is equivalent to a high school degree. The new age limit to receive the fee waivers would be 26 years old and would cover the student’s first five years of school. These tuition and fee waivers would cover the full tuition cost for foster kids to go to any community college, university, or college maintained by the state of Illinois. These bills are seeking to provide foster care children with the same opportunities as children who grew up in families and are more able to afford college. By adding these bills, Illinois could help foster children live more productive, healthy lives. Incorporating these bills would also cut costs in areas such as law enforcement because foster kids would less likely be criminal if they had more support and equal opportunities to education.

SNAP and College Students

I began by reviewing the article entitled “Rethinking College Students and SNAP” by Tom Allison, found on the list of current events for this class.  This title really drew me in because people do not understand how difficult college can be when dealing with your own adult life outside of school.  Most young adults are trying to get away from parents and learn to become their own responsible self, but college can be both a learning experience and, also a stress in lives of students everywhere.  You have no time for a steady routine like in high school.  You are trying to work when not at school, sucking up all your hours of daylight, leaving your homework time to interfere with your sleep schedule.  Depending on the major and the coursework, you may spend more time at school than others, leaving you to only be able to work a part time minimum wage job.  To help pay for groceries, many college students turn to SNAP.

This article focuses on the financial deficits in many college students’ lives and the problems they have affording enough food for themselves.  At Spelman College and Morehouse College, students held a hunger strike to change the school policy banning the sharing of any unused meal swipes with another student.  This lasted two weeks before the schools announced a plan to help students who cannot afford proper nutrition for themselves.  The article discusses that nearly 20% of college students are eligible for SNAP, but only 3% of students actually use it.  Students do not seek help for food often because of embarrassment and humiliation, and so many students go hungry because of this.  The article mentioned that these factors can lead to bad grades and even dropping out of school entirely.   The author goes over the two problems with SNAP and college students, which are the application process and the eligibility standards. In my opinion, I believe the largest barrier of college students gaining SNAP benefits is that they must work at least 20 hours a week.  College students sometimes have coursework that will take up nearly every hour of their free time outside of class; taking 20 hours of that week is a large chuck of time for completing necessary assignments.  

I find a great deal of understanding from this article, because I think I was in this position my first two years of college.  Trying to go to school five days a week, do the assigned coursework, study for quizzes and exams, and work part time, was extremely stressful and hard on me.  I was living on my own and scared to ask my parents for help.  I wanted to be able to prove to them that I was able to do this on my own without any help, which I think a lot of college students can relate to.  There were periods where I was eating ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and dinner almost every day.  I would always hear the typical college stereotype that “college students are broke” and I just thought this was a normal part of the college experience.  

I am glad that UIS Volunteer Services (I think) hands out free food to students in need, but campuses everywhere need to have groups like this.  We need nationwide knowledge of the nutritional deficits that college students face and find a way to fix this gap.  Changing eligibility requirements as mentioned in the article is a major obstacle that would be crossed by waiving the hours worked each week for students and supplement their class hours instead.  

Providing SNAP benefits on more generous terms with more accessible eligibility standards would be an easy way to help pay for college education. One of the many nice things about SNAP (speaking a a food producer—I am sometimes a farmer in the summer when not on my 9-month contract as a professor with the university) is the fact that it stimulates the economy by increasing demand for good food products (I can sell more peaches and apples and berries if poor people and college students get SNAP benefits allowing them to purchase my produce).  SNAP and other food benefits are really just another way to subsidize grocery stores, farmers, and industrial food corporations.  We get all the money eventually.  Since just handing money to food producers violates some people’s sense of fairness (we tend to not be poor, and yet there are many very large subsidies for some very wealthy agribusiness corporations), why not give us the money indirectly by giving it to college students, impoverished families with children, and persons who would otherwise be embarrassing us with their gauche tendency of getting sick with malnutrition or starvation in this rich civilization we have built? 

College students are a special population to consider.  Persons who succeed in college tend, on average, to make tens of thousands of dollars more than they would if thy merely took some college, finished an associate degree only, or completed their education with a GED or high school degree.

The 2017 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us:
Median usual weekly earnings of a college graduate: $1,173
Median usual weekly etc. of a person with an associate degree: $836
Median usual etc. of a person with some college and no degree: $774
Median etc. of a person with a high school degree or GED: $712.

So, if we have a policy that costs us, say, $5,000 per college student, and 10% of those students who receive this $5,000 in SNAP benefits complete college because of the SNAP benefits, because with those benefits, they would have given up and settled for “some college” you can see that we're raising the incomes of 10% of the recipients by about $400 per week, or approximately $20,000 per year after they graduate. The government may only directly recover $5,000 of that $20,000 through income taxes and payroll deductions, but there are multiplier effects as well, as the increased earnings of a higher educated population contribute to overall economic prosperity, and if colleges and universities are doing their work right, we should also have many benefits in terms of happier people, better citizens, more creativity, and wiser voters from the increase in educated persons. 

The next question is, does the increase in tax revenue and economic flourishing from that 10% that made it through college because they received $5000 in SNAP benefits pay for 100% of the cost of providing those SNAP benefits to all the poor college students, including the 90% who would have somehow found a way to graduate without the SNAP support?

It depends upon how long people work, I guess.  Let us do a thought experiment.  Assume the SNAP benefits are given to 100 poor college students, at a cost of $1,250 per year for four years, each student is getting $5000 in benefits over four years.  So, over the course of four years while those 100 students are in college, the program costs $500,000.  We imagine that 90 of those students would have graduated anyway, even without SNAP, so the benefit for society is that those students were able to study on full stomachs and not work so many long hours, and perhaps they learned more as a result, or had less emotional stresses, but let us assume we did not increase their earnings.  Only for 10 of those 100 students did the SNAP benefits make the difference, allowing them to graduate and earn $70,000 per year on average over a 30-year post-college-degree working life rather than the $50,000 per year they would have earned on average over a 30-year post-college-drop-out working life.

Let us say that those students earning an extra $20,000 each year pay 14% of that in payroll taxes and 11% of it in federal income taxes, so that we get back 25% of the $20,000 each year, on average.  That's $5,000 per year.  Let us also say that without a college degree, each of those students would have needed about $10,000 in benefits for four years of poverty or near-poverty in their lives when they would have qualified for Medicaid or SNAP or the EITC or something like that, but by getting them a college education, we prevented that.   So, we saved $400,000 in benefits we didn't have to pay out, and we gained $1,500,000 in increased tax revenue (ignoring entirely the multiplier effect).  So, based on those assumptions, we get back $1.9 million in reduced benefits paid out and increased tax revenues.  But, we gave $5,000 to 100 students, so the program cost us $0.5 million.  So, was it worth it?

Wow, it looks like a SNAP benefit to college students that costs us $1,250 per year in SNAP benefits for the students and induces 10% of beneficiaries to graduate from college when they would otherwise drop out with “some college” as their highest attainment is going to reap big returns, approximately $3 to $4 long-term dollars for ever $1 spent on the program.   I wonder if the 10% figure is accurate as an estimate of the facilitation of college degree completion we might get by just offering about $100 per month in SNAP benefits to all poor college students. Anyway, it looks like a good policy in terms of cost effectiveness if the assumption of producing about a 10% increase in graduation rates among poor students holds true.  

Programs don't have to be cost-effective.  Even if the program lost money in the long run, we could justify it on moral grounds in terms of giving people a chance to finish college even if they are poor, so that we can have a society based on meritocracy where talented and hard working persons from poor families have a chance to complete college and compete against the many middle-class and wealthy college students for whom food at college is not an issue.