Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
A Howard University student working remotely in March
As the government attempts to ease the economic pain caused by the coronavirus with stimulus packages and one-time checks, its response leaves one demographic to fend for themselves: Americans aged 18 to 25. College students and new graduates are too old for their families to receive the CARES Act “child bonus” of $500, and likely haven’t filed taxes to qualify them for the $1,200 stimulus check. This places them in a legislative loophole and leaves them uniquely vulnerable to economic hardship.
“There is virtually no support if a person graduating from high school or college is jobless,” says Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat, economics professor at Barnard College, in an interview with the Prospect. “We’re telling kids, go to college. Don’t get married early, don’t have kids early, go to college and get a career started before you start doing any of that stuff. Then these kids are doing everything we told them … and then we say, oh since you didn’t do any of those things, those are all of the things that all of our assistance is based on.”
Graduates who didn’t work full-time are also unlikely to qualify for any unemployment insurance, because they wouldn’t have met the earning minimums yet, despite paying taxes into the unemployment insurance fund, Ananat explains. Many workers who make federal-level minimum wage may also find themselves in that position as well. Unlike other Western countries where you can claim unemployment because you’re unemployed, Americans can only claim that benefit when they have lost their jobs. While the CARES Act added the category of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) to catch workers who fall through the normal eligibility cracks, many states have not updated their unemployment systems to allow jobless workers to access it.
The only program these “new entrants” into the workforce may qualify for is SNAP, otherwise known as food stamps.
“I think a lot of college students really need the money right now,” says Demauris Dixon, a senior at Western Illinois University. “I feel like [Congress] needs to know what college students are really feeling and should let college students have a voice. We should have a bigger outlet for students to speak on. I think anything that’s taking up someone’s time like schoolwork is a job, in my opinion, so it wouldn’t hurt to give college students money for [this situation] that’s going on out of our control.”
The absence of attention on college students may spring from the fact that Congress has the wrong idea of who college students are. “I don’t think it’s entirely political … But it is very hard for people to not think of a college student as a privileged person,” Ananat says. “In the popular imagination, if you say college student, they think of a frat boy.”
By contrast, a 2019 survey of college students found that almost 50 percent of college students are food insecure, and about 10 percent reported having to temporarily live with a relative or a friend, an indication of housing insecurity. Ananat explains that people are working to change the privileged image of college students, but as post-secondary-school degrees have become more important and the institutions more diverse, the stereotype hasn’t kept up with reality.
For many in the United States, the higher overall earning potential from university degrees makes up over time for the cost and debt needed to graduate. However, with the economy locked down to stop the spread of the virus, anyone who didn’t have a job lined up already will struggle to transition into the labor market. Even some graduates with secured full-time offers or internships have reported that their offers are being revoked or start dates delayed, according to surveys from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
Although this affects all students hoping to gain work experience this summer, seniors approaching graduation are especially vulnerable. Dixon, who will graduate after the summer session at Western Illinois, planned to work during the summer months, as he does every year. In addition to his part-time gig as a rapper and performer in Chicago, he was hoping to find a post in his areas of study, either broadcast journalism or performance art. Instead he’s finding that music venues will be closed until 2021, and media outlets are shutting their doors because of financial difficulties.
“Of course right now, all the students are back home. They’re in school and they’re at home, which is novel,” Ananat says. “Where they are now is almost certainly where they’re going to stay after the Zoom meeting where they graduate. They’re going to stay in the same room they were before and during that Zoom meeting. There’s none of that transition right now from student to graduate.”
The uncertainty is being felt in campus recruiting offices across the country. Recruiters are switching to virtual recruiting tools, but only 39 percent of offices believe they will stay in line with their schedules, while another 38 percent are unsure how this will affect their operations, according to a NACE survey from the beginning of May. The survey also says that almost 50 percent of college career centers have implemented spending freezes.
Amid uncertainty, some universities are trying to fill the gap with emergency grants. “My university is trying to help out, but I think it should be a federal thing and I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be,” Dixon says. “Students need [support] just as much as anybody.”
Not all institutions are able to assist students, and some may be worried about their own longevity as well. Community colleges are particularly vulnerable to budget cuts or closures when state governments need to balance budgets, as some states hit with the coronavirus are already doing.
“We are in very unknown territory because we haven’t had anything like this in 100 years. Economists are trying to learn as much as they can from the 1918 flu, which is a big stretch,” Ananat says. “There’s some optimism that if somehow they invented a treatment tomorrow that made this into the common cold, this might be a pretty quick recovery. The problem is we just don’t know how long this will take to recover from, and where we’ll have setbacks.”
