When College Ends, So Does Activism

Jaime Nelson could make anyone feel lazy. Over the past four years, Nelson, an undergraduate activist at the University of Michigan, has led writing workshops with Michigan’s incarcerated, organized voter registration drives to battle the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative in 2006, and united local immigrant rights and labor organizations through the Restaurant Workplace Project, a coalition that sought to expose the dangerous working conditions faced by undocumented employees of Ann Arbor’s dining establishments.

She did this on top of a work schedule – divorced from her political work – that would make Horatio Alger squirm. As a supervisor at the university library, Nelson checked out books five nights a week until 2 a.m. Two summers ago, she took a job as one of only two women on a road-paving crew in her native Kalamazoo. When she worked as a full-time unpaid intern for the public defender’s office in Washington D.C., she logged an additional 30 hours a week as a hotel attendant.

Why would anyone put herself through this? Nelson had to balance her conscience with her checkbook. Paying for college was her responsibility. ​“My parents just didn’t have money and I didn’t want to ask them for it,” she says, ​“so everything that I had, I had to pay for basically by myself.”

In April, she graduated with almost $30,000 in student loans. So she’s keeping her job at the library at night while searching during the day for work in progressive politics, which she knows won’t pay enough to cover both her cost of living and her current debt. ​“School debt is the best kind of debt to have,” she says, ​“but it’s still debt.”

Nelson is quick to point out that others have it much worse than her, but her story illustrates a growing trend among the recent crop of college graduates. Despite a job market that will treat the class of 2007 favorably, employment in progressive politics is a dicey enterprise for many left-leaning activists and thinkers. The value of jobs varies across industries and organizations, but few are economically sustainable or intellectually stimulating, which is a problem for students and progressive veterans alike.

Political McJobs

That few entry level political jobs exist is part of the problem, as documented by Columbia University sociology professor Dana R. Fisher in her book, Activism, Inc. Fisher spent two years studying one of the country’s largest canvassing companies, part of an exploitative industry that has employed millions of young Americans. In the late ​’90s, progressive organizations – concerned with raising money and membership totals but conscious of their costs – began outsourcing their organizing campaigns to centralized intermediary organizations. This model is efficient but problematic. ​“Outsourcing makes sense if you’re just thinking about your bottom line,” Fisher says. ​“The problem is that it doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to build lasting connections with future progressive leaders or with local people.”

Under this canvassing system, young organizers become contingent labor, susceptible to low pay, long hours, no benefits and no training in the real skills necessary to succeed in building local power. In some ways, the model cultivates a culture of deprivation; young people are taught to think that sacrifice is a prerequisite for progressive change and thus they tolerate exploitation for the sake of the movement. And because most organizations outsource these jobs, participating in this crooked system is one of the few avenues for paid work. ​“One could question,” says Fisher, ​“whether Saul Alinsky, Ralph Nader or Cesar Chavez would have become successful at leading different aspects of the progressive movement if they came up through the model we have today.”

Budgetary concerns of progressive organizations also contribute to underinvestment in youth. Take aspiring journalists. The few media outlets in which writers can publish thoughtful and progressively opinionated articles work on shoestring budgets. This means they can’t afford to hire experienced staff writers, much less young people committed to political journalism. Left-of-center think tanks face similar challenges. Institutions like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for American Progress have a handful of low-paid internships – both of which pay less than $10 an hour – but few entry-level job opportunities with a salary and benefits. The Progressive Policy Institute and the Brookings Institution don’t even provide internship stipends, a major concern for young people transplanted to the cities these organizations call home (Washington D.C. and New York City) that are among the world’s most expensive places to live. These cost inhibitions significantly limit the scope of their applicant pool. 

Cash rules everything around me

Because of the growing cost of college, these tiring, low-paying gigs or unpaid internships are increasingly inadequate options for left-leaning graduates. With state and federal legislators redirecting funds away from universities, college tuition has outpaced family income for the past 15 years and inflation for the past 30 years.

The burden of payment has also been shifted to the students. Loans have replaced interest-free grants as the most common form of recompense, resulting in a system whereby the average student today, according to the Center for American Progress, graduates with debt almost three and a half times that of graduates just 10 years ago. ​“The typical student is leaving with about $19,000 dollars in student loan debt,” says Tamara Draut, author of Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead. ​“And that is going to create a financial pinch when they get their first job.”

Health care is another concern. A 2006 Commonwealth Fund study found that since 2000, 2.5 million people between the age of 19 and 29 lost healthcare coverage, bringing the grand total of uninsured 20-somethings to 14 million. Among the lucky few who can pay for and get through college, 40 percent will lose their familial coverage after graduation, with under-funded organizations unlikely to pick up the costs of employer-based healthcare. 

These financial burdens disproportionately affect students of color and those from less secure economic backgrounds, whose need for job stability is generally more pressing than that of their classmates. ​“It’s always been hard to attract class diversity in the progressive movement. It’s largely been dominated by people who have family backgrounds that enable them, for whatever reason, to take a lower salary, particularly if they are just starting out,” says Draut. ​“I think the problem is that now it’s become even more challenging.” All of these factors lead even the most socially conscious graduates away from progressive politics toward less-fulfilling career fields.

Wasting a big chance

The importance of engaging and gainfully employing young progressives is hard to overstate, both for its immediate practicality and the long-term sustainability of the left. By ignoring progressive grads’ economic constraints, the progressive movement – activists and funders – are squandering an immense opportunity to utilize the ideology, size and energy of the post-graduate generation.