The Oakland Post sat down with U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) on Saturday at an Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Victory Fund event hosted at The Godfrey Detroit to discuss issues impacting Michigan college students as the general election nears. Topics include rising housing costs, making higher education more affordable and placing restrictions on artificial intelligence.
“As we gather at this AAPI outreach event, what barriers do you believe Asian American students and young professionals face in accessing career opportunities, and what can Congress do to address them?”
“Unfortunately, especially after the last year and a half, there has been a full-blown attack on diversity, equity and inclusion, and that has filtered down through the Trump Administration to be a full-on attack on immigrants, diversity, that kind of inclusiveness in our institutions that we always valued. And our institutions, some of them have responded well and pushed back, some of them have cowered in the face of that anti-DEI push, and I think the most important thing I can do right now is stand up to that generational attack on diversity.”
“In the state of Michigan, we all know there is no way forward without diverse leadership, without raising a diverse next generation; we’re not gonna be successful as a state without it. And frankly, we’re not going to be growing as a state if we don’t bring in more immigrants, not less. So, I think being a voice for that and then frankly, making sure they don’t kill really important internship, apprenticeship and scholarship opportunities aimed at people who might not naturally be going to college, going to university. That’s what we spend a lot of time doing, and hopefully in the next couple of months, we’ll have more opportunities to fight with sharper tools.”
“For many young Michiganders, rising housing costs have made financial independence and homeownership increasingly difficult. What federal policies would you pursue to make housing more accessible for first-time buyers and recent graduates?”
“We are in the middle of a housing crisis, a housing emergency. We’re down four million units of housing across the country. Here in Michigan, but in every state of the country, particularly those smaller middle-class homes that would be starter homes or starter apartments. If it were me, and we’ve done a bill on this, I’d declare a housing emergency. Just like you’d declare an emergency after a hurricane, declare a housing emergency. You’d suspend federal regulations so you can just do a building blitz of small and medium-sized homes. And there are a bunch of different tools to do that, but until and unless we get those four million units, we’re in an emergency situation because there’s nothing more connected to the American dream than owning your home. That’s central to who we are as Americans. So declare a housing emergency.”
“The President has declared an emergency on everything, including on Canada. So if we can declare an emergency on Canada, we can declare a housing emergency and actually create a boom in housing building. So that’s what I would do.”
“As tuition and living expenses continue to burden Michigan college students, what specific federal measures would you support to make higher education more affordable and reduce student debt?”
“Again, we’d have to reverse some of the cuts that the president has put in place, but for me, I’m a big believer in this idea that everyone should be able to access education that they can afford, and it shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive for us to educate our young people because there’s no more important natural resource that we have than young people. It’s our whole life as a country.”
“Capping student loans. Right now, these companies are allowed to make money off of an 18-year-old student who just wants to go to college at Oakland University and needs to take out a loan. But getting a loan for your education is fundamentally different from getting a loan to build a new deck on your house. It’s an investment in yourself and in your country. And so, why should you pay ten percent, eleven percent interest rates? There should be low or no-cost loans for any student loans; I just think it’s fundamentally different. And then, we need to expand the scholarship programs for first-gen college students, for diverse college students who maybe wouldn’t have the opportunity otherwise. There’s big federal scholarship programs that we could dump money into if we really believed it, and the other piece that I’m super interested in for Michigan is this idea: a lot of people are so scared of college debt that they’re not going to college.”
“On the other side, we have Michigan employers who are like, ‘I’m desperate for young people.’ Why don’t we have more of these programs where you go to school part-time, you work part-time at that company, they pay for your education, and if you graduate, well, you don’t get into trouble, everything goes right, you go right into a job and you’re basically debt-free. A lot of Michigan companies, like Dow does this in Midland so that kids can go into college knowing, ‘I’m actually going to come out with a job and no debt.’ So I’m a big believer in those programs.”
“You’ve spoken about the importance of attracting and retaining young people in Michigan. Beyond creating jobs, what specific investments do you believe are necessary to make Michigan a place where recent graduates can afford to build their futures?”
“People need to be able to afford that first apartment or that first home. They need to be able to have transportation to work; they need to be able to have healthcare they can afford; all of those things and we need to grow as a state. That is really existential for us. We need to grow, and right now, we’re shrinking, and that’s a problem. So what I can do from the federal level is find different ways to support Michigan being a place where young people want to stay after they graduate and where they want to move to from other states.”
“I have three brothers, and they’ve all moved out of state. Bad news. We need more people who, maybe they go away for a couple of years, but they come back, or they just choose to graduate and make their life; they move to another city in Michigan, but they make their life in Michigan.”
“And in order to do that, we need to have better internships, better workforce training, better apprenticeships and a better path from school to work, so that when you’re a sophomore in college, you’re like, ‘I actually know what some of my options are now, and I can start getting those internships, getting those jobs for those apprenticeships so that I can go right into a job.”
“As artificial intelligence increasingly transforms the workforce, what federal protections would you support to prevent the displacement of entry-level workers, particularly recent college graduates entering Michigan’s job market?”
“This is a huge issue that anyone in the workforce should be thinking about and what is it gonna do to them? We don’t totally know all the details, but we know that A), the AI companies need to be held liable for the products they make. So if they’re AI models jump out of the playpen and start attacking other websites. That’s committing a crime; they need to be held accountable for the products that they make. They don’t get a free pass. Number two, there needs to be some sort of compensation that those companies provide to help with workforce training and retraining.”
“AI companies train their models on human history. They train it on what we’ve all done together as human beings. They didn’t make that. So if they’re gonna use human history and human language as their training ground, they can give some money back for workforce training, so that if you’re out of a job or can’t find a job and you need help in in retraining or training, there’s a one-stop shop, a ‘jobs 101’ that you can go to and you can get money for that training or retraining provided by our AI companies.”
“You’ve supported federal legislation aimed at expanding housing supply and lowering costs. How would those measures specifically benefit college students and recent graduates struggling to afford housing in metro Detroit?”
“Because we have this massive shortage, the price of the average home has been jacked up. So a college graduate, there’s no way because you’re competing against people who have been in the workplace for fifteen years and are buying a house. So the more supply on the market, prices come down; suddenly you get something you can afford.”
“Now, we all know, the place you’re gonna get the year you’re out of school is not gonna be the place you’re gonna live 20 years from then. So you’re not gonna get a mansion the first day out, but I don’t know anyone who’s asking for a mansion the first year out of school. But you’re asking for some decent place to live. If we don’t deal with the supply and demand problem overall, college students will also be priced out of the market or recent college grads, and so supply, supply, supply.”