Spring Legislative Action Days

During April 2-3, 2022 Purdue Graduate Student Government (PGSG)’s Rebecca-Eli Long, Legislative Affairs Officer, and Alex Seto, Chief of Staff, attended the Spring Advocacy Summit hosted by the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students (NAGPS). The summit brought together graduate student leaders from around the country to develop advocacy skills to increase our impact on our campuses and in government policy. This event included skills training to help us become more effective advocates on behalf of PGSG as well as workshops on policy issues impacting graduate students, such as science funding, open access research, mental health, and international student visas.

Following these two days of sessions, Rebecca-Eli and Alex met Senator Todd Young and Representative Jim Baird’s offices. We will be meeting with Senator Mike Braun’s office later this month. On behalf of PGSG, we advocated for the following issues, based on NAGPS’ legislative priorities and data they provided:

• Student Debt. As the largest category of non-mortgage debt held by American consumers, student debt totals over $1.7 trillion. This is an issue that disproportionately impacts graduate students, who make up 25% of student loan borrowers but are responsible for 50% of student debt. We encouraged Congress to extend the federal pause on student loan payments, as well as make it easier to get student loan debt forgiven. For example, S.2442 – Adjunct Faculty Loan Fairness Act of 2021 would allow adjunct faculty to qualify for public service loan forgiveness sooner and H.R.2418 – Student Loan Forgiveness for Frontline Health Workers Act would forgive student debt for those who worked as frontline healthcare workers during the pandemic. We also advocated for making subsidized federal student loans available to graduate students through H.R.4631 – POST GRAD Act.
• International Student Visas. 41% of Purdue’s graduate student body are international students. International students are vital to higher education, and also make significant contributions to the U.S. economy. We advocated for expanding dual-intent status to F-1 visa holders (25% of F-visa applications are denied because applicants do not demonstrate that they do not intend to immigrate to the U.S.) and exempting graduates from U.S. institutions from H-1 visa caps. These steps would make it easier for U.S. trained graduate students to remain in the country after graduation if they would like to stay.
• Graduate student mental health and science funding. One important set of bills for higher education is S.1260 – United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 and H.R.4521 – America COMPETES Act of 2022. These bills address a large set of issues around technology, manufacturing, and foreign relations. Relevant to graduate students, these bills help fund the National Science Foundation, combat campus sexual hassasment, and encourage that federally-funded research be made open access. The Senate version of this bill also includes provisions from the College Transparency Act, which would gather data on student outcomes, including time to degree, expenses, and career outcomes. This data could help incoming graduate students make a more informed decision about selecting a program. These bills have passed the Senate and House, and are currently in reconciliations to create a final version of the bill. We advocated for keeping the provisions from the College Transparency Act and other provisions that support graduate students in the final version of the bill.

We hope this will be the beginning of an ongoing relationship between these offices and PGSG and we invited staffers to reach out to us if they have questions about future legislation impacting graduate students. 

Graduate students who would like to learn more about these issues and how they can advocate with legislators are encouraged to reach out to Rebecca-El Long, pgsg.lad@gmail.com