Where They Stand: Student Issues

Tuesday’s election could shape the future of a number of issues affecting Harvard students. We asked the candidates for Massachusetts’ junior U.S. Senate seat and Massachusetts Fifth Congressional District seat to share how they would approach five important student-related issues if elected. Their responses are printed in full below.

The Questions:

1. The unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent nationally in September, reaching its lowest point in four years. But college graduates still face one of the most difficult job markets in decades. If elected, what concrete proposals would you support to create jobs and help get young people back to work?

2. With university endowments stagnant and the cost of higher education on the rise, would you support measures to increase funding for federal financial aid in the form of either grants or low-interest loans?

3. If elected to Congress, you will likely have to make difficult decisions to address the growing federal deficit. In this situation, what would be the most important programs to protect, and how would you approach federal research funding?

4. Despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the costs of healthcare in this country continue to rise at a potentially crippling pace. What is your view of the ACA and what would you do to further health care reform in this country?

5. While President Barack Obama’s executive order announced this summer has given breathing room to millions of college students brought here illegally as children, it is not a permanent solution. Do you support the DREAM Act, and if not, how do you propose reforming the country’s immigration policy?

Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren's Responses:

1. It’s clear we need to take action to make sure our college graduates have access to jobs, so young people aren’t struggling to make ends meet and facing crushing student loan debt.

We have both a short-term jobs problem and a long-term jobs problem. Right now, we need to put people to work. Without a job and a paycheck, people can’t spend money, and that hurts businesses and depresses the economy. In the longer term, we need to invest in our future to create the conditions for our people to prosper and our economy to grow. That means investing in infrastructure, education, and research.

Jumpstarting the economy right now and creating the conditions for future growth will help make sure businesses can succeed and young people can find good jobs.

2. Yes, I support keeping interest rates low and making sure that students have access to Pell Grants and other financial aid so they can pay for college. This is ultimately about our priorities. We should not be giving subsidies to oil companies and tax breaks to billionaires, while students are taking on more and more debt. I grew up in an America that invested in its kids. I went to a commuter college where I paid $50 a semester in tuition. Today, students across the country have more than $1 trillion total in student loan debt. We need to make investing in education a priority again, so that everyone who wants to can afford to go to college. This will help strengthen our economy and make sure all our young people have a real shot at success.

3. This is a question about values, and what kind of a future we want to build. We need a balanced approach to reducing the deficit that includes both spending cuts and additional revenues. Scott Brown and I both submitted our economic proposals to the Boston Globe, and independent analysis found that my proposals were 67 percent more effective at reducing the debt. I oppose cutting programs like Medicare and Social Security, which are critical for so many Americans. We need to protect and strengthen those programs. We also need to prioritize investments in education, infrastructure, and research—the pipeline of ideas that helps businesses grow and succeed. I believe that by asking those at the top to pay a fair share and making the right cuts in spending, such as ending tax breaks to big oil, we can close the deficit and build a better future.

4. The Affordable Care Act has helped ensure that millions of children, seniors, and families can get access to high quality, affordable health care, and fair treatment from insurance companies. It has let kids stay on their parents insurance until age 26, helped seniors pay for prescription drugs, and ensured that women can get preventive services like mammograms at no cost. I’m committed to protecting President Obama’s health care reform law, which is already making a difference for so many people here in the Commonwealth and across the country. We should not refight the health care battles of the past, we should work to make health care reform more effective and move on to other urgent challenges we face.

Now we need to focus on slowing the growth of health care costs. About half of all families in bankruptcy are there in the aftermath of a serious medical problem, and millions more are under enormous financial pressure when a loved one is ill. Massachusetts has been a leader in developing innovative ways to improve quality while reducing costs, and we are a leader in medical research that can lead to breakthroughs that save both lives and costs. We must do more to lead the way to a more affordable and higher quality system.

5. I support the DREAM Act, and President Obama’s efforts to help young people who have lived in the United States for years to have a shot at the American Dream. Even though it is a fair and bipartisan bill, Republican Scott Brown has opposed the DREAM Act.

Throughout our history, America’s diversity has made us stronger, more innovative, and more creative. That’s why I support common sense, comprehensive immigration reform. I believe we need reform that is true to the rule of law, to our tradition as a nation of immigrants, and to our need to invest in the future.

U.S. Senator Scott Brown's Responses:

According to studies by the Kaufmann Foundation, new start-up businesses are the source of all the net job growth in the country over the past 20 years. Scott Brown has a record of working across the aisle to boost the MA innovation economy, and he will work with either President Obama or a President Romney on policies that will create a stronger economy for all Americans.

For recent college graduates, one of the biggest policies he will continue to work on is innovation and entrepreneurship. Many recent graduates today are interested in raising funds to launch their own start-up business. Senator Brown was invited to the White House for the signing of his crowdfunding bill, which will allow entrepreneurs­­­—such as student entrepreneurs at the Cambridge Innovation Center—to raise up to $1 million per year in equity financing over the internet. The crowdfunding bill is currently in the final rulemaking phase at the SEC.

In addition to implementing the crowdfunding bill next year, Sen. Brown is a co-sponsor of the START-UP 2.0 bill, which will give visas to entrepreneurs from other countries who want to start a business in America and students with an M.A. degree or PhD. Additionally, Start-UP 2.0 streamlines regulations, provides a capital gains exemption for investments in start-ups that are held longer than 5 years. The final provision would provide accelerated commercialization of university-based research. Promising students in STEM fields would have access to more business opportunities and connections with angel investors.

With her massive tax hikes, Elizabeth Warren would destroy jobs and make a bad economy even worse. She supports the largest tax hike in this country since World War II to the tune of $3.4 trillion dollars. According to economists at Ernst and Young, Elizabeth Warren’s policies of sharply higher taxes on the small businesses will destroy at least 700,000 jobs across the country, including more than 17,000 here in Massachusetts.

2. Yes—Senator Brown will continue to advocate for more federal support to defray the costs of higher education such as subsidized student loans and grants, but it’s also critical that colleges and universities get their costs under control, so that deficit spending by the federal government is not simply padding the bank accounts of overpaid university administrations. Administrative costs, such as Elizabeth Warren’s Harvard salary of $350,000 for teaching one class, have been accelerating faster than any other form of university spending and have become a major driver of tuition increases. Additionally, Warren receives a zero interest loan from Harvard while she runs a lucrative corporate law practice out of her office, meaning that Harvard students have been going deep into debt to subsidize the lifestyle of a millionaire law professor. Today’s students are drowning in debt, and excessive salaries like Professor Warren’s a big reason why.

3. While all forms of government spending must be scrutinized for waste, fraud and abuse, cutting federal research funding isn’t the answer to our budget problems. Senator Brown has worked with other members of the Massachusetts delegation, writing letters urging the protection of NIH research funding and will continue to be an advocate for it. Before cutting research, we need to address wasteful spending on agriculture subsidies, fraud in our healthcare and defense budget, and freezing federal salaries and benefits before we look to try to reduce research spending.

But with our national debt soaring past $16 trillion and rising, we need to get a handle on out-of-control government spending immediately, and that is why Senator Brown supports a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution that would force the federal government to spend only as much money as it takes in each year. Our national debt is a moral and economic outrage, and we cannot just pass it on to future generations. It threatens the fiscal solvency of our nation, and if we don’t act soon, we risk going down the path of Greece and other European nations that find themselves on the verge of falling off a fiscal cliff. Professor Warren opposes a Balanced Budget Amendment, and has even called it a “trick.” This is a big difference between the candidates.

4. We know now that the Affordable Care Act is anything but affordable. With 18 new taxes, and higher costs for families and businesses, it needs to be replaced with simple, cost-efficient incentives to encourage states to expand coverage in a way that is best for their state. The bill will destroy jobs for recent college grads in promising Massachusetts industries in such as the medical device industry, which is getting slammed in the bill with a massive new excise tax. The bill is making healthcare more expensive for Americans rather than less—by as much as 30 percent according to former Obama economic advisor Jonathan Gruber. The Washington Post and other news outlets have reported that college students who used to be able to access affordable plans for a couple hundred dollars per semester are seeing premium increases of more than $1,000, because of all the government mandates in the federal bill. Elizabeth Warren supports the national health care law, even though it will destroy jobs in Massachusetts—a state that had already achieved 98 percent coverage. She has said she would like to go even further and implement a radical, single-payer, European health care system that would lead to rationing. As a state senator, Scott Brown voted for the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law, and believes that health care is an issue that should be decided at the state level.

5. Senator Brown is a strong supporter of improving our legal immigration process. He believes that because of the extraordinary sacrifices involved, young people who have volunteered for military service to our nation should have the opportunity to pursue American citizenship. He does not support the current DREAM Act, because the bill rewards too many people who willfully broke the law, putting those families in front of immigrant families who are doing the right thing, following the law, and waiting years to get legal status in America. Without major reforms to improve our immigration system, the DREAM Act makes illegal immigration by parents much more attractive than legal immigration. Elizabeth Warren supports giving taxpayer-funded benefits, such as in-state tuition rate and driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, and she opposes the Secure Communities program, which allows law enforcement officials to simply check the immigration status of those who commit violent crimes.

Consulting Actuary Tom Tierney's Responses:

1. I’m running on a four-point platform. Three of those elements, a solution to health care (see Question 4 below), increasing taxes (see Question 3 below), and restricted job guarantees for the long term unemployed will greatly enhance job creation. The last one [no further cuts in Social Security’s benefit structure] will also, in a smaller way, affect the noted enhancement.

2. Read my answer to Question No. 3 below and then return. And beware of any candidate who says he/she supports “measures to increase funding” and then tap dances around the requisite funding question.  President Obama’s [strategy of] borrow-what-you-need-from-the-Feds and pay it back via a percentage of your employment income for a number of years deserves further consideration.

3. Reducing the federal deficit calls for a two-phase attack—increasing revenues and cutting expenditures.  At the moment my focus is on increasing revenues. More specifically, I’m currently campaigning (and am the only Republican challenger in the USA so doing) to allow all of the Bush-Obama temporary tax cuts to expire this coming year-end.  Once that’s done (and that for me is the easy part) the more difficult task of my sifting through thousands of budget expenditures will begin.

4. I’m a keep-and-fix guy which means Obamacare, in my expert opinion [as a practicing actuary], is a mess but it should be amended and not repealed outright. And here’s my proposed replacement:

For people ages 65 and over: Give them traditional Medicare as it currently exists and insist that there be no benefit cutbacks.

For people under age 65: Give everyone of them and/or their employers the option to buy into ages 65 and over traditional medicare; sit back and watch the stampede as small businesses and local governments rush to sign up their employees.

For low income people at all ages: Give them traditional Medicaid (called MassHealth in Massachusetts) as a supplement.

5. I support the DREAM Act.

U.S. Congressman Edward J. Markey did not submit answers to The Crimson.