Future Forum
Floor Speech
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Mr. SWALWELL of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to report back to the Congress on the progress of the House Democratic Caucus' newest group, Future Forum.
Future Forum is made up of 14 Members of Congress who are going across the country to talk about issues facing young Americans. We launched just last Thursday. We have gone to New York, Boston, and San Francisco, and we are just warming up.
Our goal is to listen to--not talk to--young Americans about issues ranging from student loan debt, climate change, access to entrepreneurship, and anything that is on their mind or standing in their way of achieving their dreams, hopes, and aspirations.
I encourage anyone watching tonight across America to tweet at me and to tweet at Future Forum under #futureforum, so that we can address your concerns right here on the House floor and across the country.
We started Thursday evening in New York City. I was joined by Democratic Policy and Communications chair Steve Israel; Congresswoman Grace Meng, who represents the Queens area; and Congressman Seth Moulton, who represents the greater Boston area.
Our first stop was at the District Cowork space in Manhattan in the Flatiron District. You see here in this photo, this was not just any rigid, stuffy townhall. We invited young entrepreneurs across Manhattan and asked them at District Cowork: What stands in your way from achieving your startup success?
You have in this room these young, energetic entrepreneurs. They are ready to risk it all for their big idea. They are all millennials, aged anywhere from 18 to 35; and it was a very informal, fluid session.
What we heard was not surprising, but it was very striking. For too many of them, when we asked, How many of you have student loan debt, their hands went up. For too many of them, when we asked, How much is your student loan debt, their hands stayed up when I said, Is it above $25,000 or $50,000 or $100,000?
Then I asked and my colleagues asked: What would you do with that money? What would you spend it on if you weren't spending it every month on your student loan debt?
These young, business-minded people, they didn't say: I would go on a vacation, or I would buy a new toy or a boat or have fun for myself.
They said: I would invest it in my company. I would invest it in my company.
What do we know happens when entrepreneurs invest money in their companies? They create jobs. They create growth around their industries that put more and more Americans to work.
Future Forum members learned a lot at this visit, and what we learned was that student loan debt is a barrier--not just a barrier, it is a tall brick wall that is standing in the way of an entire generation realizing their entrepreneurial dreams.
What we heard at District Cowork in New York was not unique. In San Francisco, we went to Hive, and we visited their Impact Hub. Hive looked just like District Cowork. You have tall ceilings, nothing on the walls--they are barely painted--no carpet on the floor, just a building filled with a lot of energy, a lot of good ideas, but a lot of challenges standing in their way.
At Hive, these young entrepreneurs, just like other entrepreneurs across the country, they told us student loan debt is standing in their way. Forty-one million young Americans have a collective amount of $1.3 trillion in student loan debt.
We heard from people at Hive that their debt was not just standing in the way of them starting their own business, but we asked the room--and at this event, I was joined by Congressman Ruben Gallego of the Phoenix area and Congressman Pete Aguilar of the San Bernardino area in California and Congressman Derek Kilmer of the Tacoma, Washington, area--we asked the room, about 100 people: How many of you own a home? Crickets, dead silent.
How many of you have parents who own a home? Most of their hands went up.
How many of you are renters now? Most of their hands stayed up.
How many of you fear that you will not be able to ever own a home in your life? Again, these young people, full of energy, great ideas, great educations, their hands stayed up.
We asked: What is standing in the way? The hundreds of dollars a month they are paying in student loan debt.
Homeownership, one of the bedrocks of the American Dream, to have something to call your own, something that we fought during our independence as a country, that right for property, to chart your own course, have your own piece of land, now, an entire generation of millennial Americans, 80 million of them, have mounting student loan debt that is going to delay their ability to buy a home, that is going to delay their ability to start and have a family, that is going to delay their opportunity to chase their dreams.
While we were in California, we also visited Chabot College in Hayward, California, in the 15th Congressional District, which I am proud to represent. At Chabot College, we assembled over 100 community college students, and we asked them: How much student debt do you think you will have by the time you take your first postcollege job?
What we learned there, again, was very, very bewildering. Most anticipated that they would have $25,000 to $50,000 in student loan debt.
We did it in a very interactive way. We used text polling, so we asked the students to text in their answers. We polled the group and said: Are you able to take a full load of courses so that you can get out of community college as fast as possible and move on to a 4-year university and move on into your career field?
Most of them said that they couldn't. One student told us he worked three jobs. The jobs, they were all mostly the same. They weren't jobs that were going to put them into the area of industry they would hope and aspire to be in. They were retail and restaurant jobs.
The members of Future Forum could identify with this. Congressman Kilmer talked about washing dishes in college, and Congressman Gallego talked about working as a restaurant server, and I harkened back to my days in this town in Washington, D.C., as an unpaid intern and working at Tortilla Coast at the end of the day to make it work.
Things are different now. Tuition continues to go up. These students told us, during our Future Forum visit, that they are taking a number of odd jobs just to pay for the rising cost of community college.
We talked about the President's plan during the State of the Union in this very Chamber to offer free community college to anyone who was qualified and able and willing. The students were hopeful but not too optimistic. They see too many barriers and walls here in Washington to get anything done that could help them.
We also asked the students to participate in a word cloud. A word cloud is you text in an answer, and, on the screen behind us, it put different words in response to different answers. We asked the students: What would you do if you didn't have student debt every month? What would your payment money go to?
Again, no one said they were going to buy a bunch of toys or go on a bunch of fancy vacations. They said that they would probably buy a car so they didn't have to take the bus or take the BART to class; they would hope to buy their first home; they would invest--which would help the economy.
Future Forum was also at San Francisco State University, and a young girl at San Francisco State University, as we talked about solutions we could offer to address rising tuition rates for current students and the debt burden that 41 million Americans carry, one San Francisco State student told us that she had a dual challenge in her house.
She was trying to pay for her own education, make it by, not qualifying for many student loans, while her mother also had $200,000 of her own student debt. This is a family matter--this is a family matter--not just for that young San Francisco State student, but for millions of young people across the country. This debt is beginning to pile up and affect multiple generations.
We had the honor of going to Boston, where we were hosted by Congressmen Joe Kennedy and Seth Moulton. We visited Thermo Fisher Scientific, and we met with young scientists, people who invested in their own future by taking student loans and going to college and getting, in many cases, graduate degrees to work in the field of science, to work in the field of therapies and devices, hoping that they could play a critical role in helping people, making the world a better place.
At Thermo Fisher, these young scientists told us exactly what we heard in San Francisco and in New York City. Their student loan debt weighs on them. It holds them down like an anchor.
Something happened at the Thermo Fisher visit that we didn't expect--because you have a room full of young entrepreneurs, young scientists, but there was a mother who showed up. She kind of confessed: Well, you know, I know this event was billed as a millennial event.
She told us she was worried about her daughter. Her daughter had gone to college, just as we had, as a society, told young people you have to do. Her daughter took out a number of student loans, and her daughter lives at home and can't find a job.
What we are seeing for our millennial generation and what was expressed by this mother is that we are at risk of becoming a permanent boomerang generation. We go out, and we study, and we attain a degree or training or technical skills; but because of the rising costs of tuition and the debt that our generation is saddled with, we boomerang back home. This mother told us it doesn't just weigh on her daughter, who has a college degree and is trying to find a job, but that it weighs on the entire household.
With 41 million young people across our country with $1.3 trillion in student loan debt, imagine how many families are affected by this. These are typically your parents who are just starting to realize their golden years.
They worked so hard; paid into Social Security; hopefully had a pension; and they want to retire, maybe travel, maybe take up a hobby, maybe join a local club; but their hopes and dreams--their golden retirements--are being affected by children who are returning to the home and need their support. We heard this all across America on this tour. This is a family matter, the student loan debt crisis in our country.
Finally, in the Boston area, we also went to Greentown Labs, a clean tech incubator I visited with Congressmen MOULTON and KENNEDY in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Here, we heard, again, about student loan debt, but we also were asked by a number of people at this event: What is standing in the way of fixing this problem?
We actually asked the audience: What do you think? From your perspective, what do you think is standing in the way?
So many of them told us campaign finance laws--a smart, young crowd in Somerville at Greentown Labs--campaign finance laws, people in the audience told us--young entrepreneurs--and I thought they were just focused like a laser on their ideas and on raising money for their first and second rounds of funding and on trying to scale up and getting their ideas off the ground. No. These young people, they get it.
They told us exactly what the problem was. Because of unlimited amounts of money that can be spent in elections today, there is less courage in the Congress to do big things, to tackle big problems, and to help a whole country of people who need it.
They asked us about climate change. Now, this was the first laboratory we had visited on the tour, and we had met with a number of young scientists who were working in the clean tech and clean energy areas. They asked us about climate change and what we were doing in Congress to address it. I want to just go to some of the people who have tweeted in to us about Future Forum this evening and what their thoughts are.
I will first mention Hive, who has tweeted at us in San Francisco that they are excited about the ideas presented and the issues raised and ``let's get to work.''
I want to tell you how we are getting to work. This was not just a one-way talking-to with millennials. Through #futureforum, through medium.com, through the article we wrote and posted there, and through the information we have collected across the country, we are actually putting the ball in the court of the young entrepreneurs and students who are charting this new economy. We told them to help us crowdsource ideas that can move America forward, and they gave us some at these visits.
With student loan debt being, probably, the biggest, most pressing issue, there was a general consensus that there are two groups affected by this. The first group is of the students who are enrolled right now and paying tuition and accruing debt. The second group is of the 41 million young Americans who already have student loan debt.
The solutions that were thrown at us for the students who are in school now or who will be in school was, one, treat public education as a public good. Find a way to make sure that any qualified, capable person who wants to go to college can do so, and keep the costs as low or as next to zero as you can.
We had people who were so excited about the Future Forum who had graduated college 30, 40 years ago who came out and talked to us, and they harkened back to a time in California when, in the UC and Cal State systems, tuition was essentially free--they even threw in the yearbook--yet the return on investment was a whole generation of educated individuals who would contribute to the greatest economy in the United States: California.
Their eyes popped out when they saw how much it costs today to go to UC Berkeley: $33,000 today is what it costs a year for a student to go to UC Berkeley. People who had attended 20, 30 years ago talked about when it was almost next to nothing. It is $33,000 a year.
Congressman Gallego looked at that number--and he went to Harvard. Harvard is the Berkeley of the East. Congressman Gallego looked at that number, and he said: That is about what I paid when I graduated from Harvard in the early 2000s, $33,000 a year.
Treat education as a public good. Keep interest rates as low as possible. The consensus among people who met with us--these current students and entrepreneurs--was that the government should make no money on interest rates on loans that it gives to students.
What about the 41 million young Americans who have the $1.3 trillion in debt? There was a general consensus that those debtholders should be able to refinance their student loans. You can refinance an auto loan. You can refinance your home loan, but for the 86 percent of loans that are the Federal loans of those 41 million Americans, you can't refinance them.
Congressman Joe Courtney, a colleague of mine from Connecticut, has a bill that would allow just that. Our Future Forum members are on that bill, and we are hoping that it gets a vote in this Congress because this should be a bipartisan issue.
Those 41 million Americans are not Democrats--they are not all Democrats, and they are not all Republicans. They are hopeful, aspirational young people who should benefit from the same refinancing laws that you can use with your home mortgage or with your auto loan.
There were other big ideas, and no idea was too big or small for this crowd. There was the proposal to have a jubilee for all of the federally funded student loans--to take every borrower, return that money to those borrowers, to put them at zero, and watch where the money would go.
The hypothesis was, if these students did not have to pay anywhere from $100 to $1,000 every month, they are not going to pocket the money; they are going to put the money back in the economy, and it would essentially be a stimulus.
I encourage everyone across the country--every young person, every parent of a young person, every grandparent of a young person--to give us your ideas. Future Forum is just getting started. We already are working with our colleague Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, who is excited and eager to host us in Michigan, and with other colleagues who want to bring us to their States to talk to young people.
Give us your ideas. You can tweet them at
#futureforum. Put it on Instagram. You can find us on Facebook. Tweet. Facebook. Instagram. Use social media, #futureforum. Give us your ideas because the goal is for us to listen to you and then to work here in a bipartisan way to act on your behalf.
This conversation will continue. Our work will go on until we have lifted the burden that stands in the way of young, aspirational entrepreneurs.
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