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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the state of Michigan, we all know there is no way forward without diverse leadership, without raising a diverse next generation; we\u2019re not gonna be successful as a state without it. And frankly, we\u2019re not going to be growing as a state if we don\u2019t bring in more immigrants, not less. So, I think being a voice for that and then frankly, making sure they don\u2019t kill really important internship, apprenticeship and scholarship opportunities aimed at people who might not naturally be going to college, going to university. That\u2019s what we spend a lot of time doing, and hopefully in the next couple of months, we\u2019ll have more opportunities to fight with sharper tools.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are in the middle of a housing crisis, a housing emergency. We\u2019re 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\u2019ve done a bill on this, I\u2019d declare a housing emergency. Just like you\u2019d declare an emergency after a hurricane, declare a housing emergency. You\u2019d 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\u2019re in an emergency situation because there\u2019s nothing more connected to the American dream than owning your home. That\u2019s central to who we are as Americans. So declare a housing emergency.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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\u2019s what I would do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAgain, we\u2019d have to reverse some of the cuts that the president has put in place, but for me, I\u2019m a big believer in this idea that everyone should be able to access education that they can afford, and it shouldn\u2019t be cost-prohibitive for us to educate our young people because there\u2019s no more important natural resource that we have than young people. It\u2019s our whole life as a country.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCapping 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\u2019s 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\u2019s fundamentally different. And then, we need to expand the scholarship programs for first-gen college students, for diverse college students who maybe wouldn\u2019t have the opportunity otherwise. There\u2019s big federal scholarship programs that we could dump money into if we really believed it, and the other piece that I\u2019m super interested in for Michigan is this idea: a lot of people are so scared of college debt that they\u2019re not going to college.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the other side, we have Michigan employers who are like, \u2018I\u2019m desperate for young people.\u2019 Why don\u2019t 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\u2019t get into trouble, everything goes right, you go right into a job and you\u2019re basically debt-free. A lot of Michigan companies, like Dow does this in Midland so that kids can go into college knowing, \u2018I\u2019m actually going to come out with a job and no debt.\u2019 So I\u2019m a big believer in those programs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople 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\u2019re shrinking, and that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have three brothers, and they\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd 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\u2019re a sophomore in college, you\u2019re like, \u2018I 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs 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\u2019s job market?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a huge issue that anyone in the workforce should be thinking about and what is it gonna do to them? We don\u2019t 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\u2019re AI models jump out of the playpen and start attacking other websites. That\u2019s committing a crime; they need to be held accountable for the products that they make. They don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAI companies train their models on human history. They train it on what we\u2019ve all done together as human beings. They didn\u2019t make that. So if they\u2019re gonna use human history and human language as their training ground, they can give some money back for workforce training, so that if you\u2019re out of a job or can\u2019t find a job and you need help in in retraining or training, there\u2019s a one-stop shop, a \u2018jobs 101\u2019 that you can go to and you can get money for that training or retraining provided by our AI companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause we have this massive shortage, the price of the average home has been jacked up. So a college graduate, there\u2019s no way because you\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, we all know, the place you\u2019re gonna get the year you\u2019re out of school is not gonna be the place you\u2019re gonna live 20 years from then. So you\u2019re not gonna get a mansion the first day out, but I don\u2019t know anyone who\u2019s asking for a mansion the first year out of school. But you\u2019re asking for some decent place to live. If we don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Oakland Post sat down with U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) on Saturday at an Asian American Pacific…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-503721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}