The truth about twenty-somethings - 20-year-olds - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1995 by Jon Meacham

The twentysomethings who lobbied Congress about student loans, however, weren't interested in making government--which they gladly dun for grants and loans that are hard to collect--work. On Capitol Hill, students testified against the IRS provision and ginned up letters from key states and districts. At one hearing, USSA entered this into the record of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee:

"Where are students supposed to turn to for counseling and information on their student loan repayment options and problems? The IRS? The current system is far from perfect, but at least students can work with their lender on deferment and forbearance options. Will the IRS provide counseling?"

What did USSA want? More federal grant money. "USSA would say if you want to end the default rate, why doesn't the federal government give more grant money so that students don't have to borrow so much?" asks 22-year-old Laura McClintock, USSA's president. "You don't default on grants." So a premier activist group, made up of students, wants the government in the game enough to take money from Washington but not enough to make repayment--a reciprocal responsibility that conservatives, with their Burkean tradition of self-reliance, should love--more reliable and more humane. Sounds like every other kind of interest group, liberal, conservative, and in-between: Give us ours, but don't ask us to give anything back.

In the end, because the House Ways and Means and Education and Labor committees could not resolve the issue, the IRS role was banished to a study group of Treasury and Education officials, from which it has, more than a year later, not yet emerged. But pressure from the group all this is supposed to help--the students--could force the issue out into the light of day where the president could rally support to break the bureaucratic logjam. But there was--and is--no such pressure. Instead, students, like Western ranchers or trial lawyers or any other narrow interest group, are guarding their turf at the expense of good ideas.

What would prevent this? A willingness to trust government with collections (after all, when it came to the government writing the checks, there was plenty of trust); a concession that students, in exchange for benefits, should be willing to pay the system back; and finally a sense of history, the appreciation that a new GI Bill could work wonders to make college more accessible and graduates' choices later in life less directly tied to money.

A generation that could see these points is what we want, but it is not what we have. Turning this around will take nothing less than breaking the mental blocks about government that most Republicans and even many Democrats have. Once those blocks are broken--once people understand that government is a way to solve problems we all want solved, not an automatic evil--then the fog may lift, and perhaps--just perhaps--it will once again be cool to believe.