You shouldn’t care about lobbying. You shouldn’t care about what our legislators decide in Salem. You really shouldn’t care about how much funding our state gives to our higher education system.
Lobbying sucks. It’s boring, you talk to a bunch of people you don’t know, begging and pleading with them for five minutes in the most professional way possible for your cause, and hope that you made enough of an impression to sway someone’s vote. To the political scientists, and public affairs majors, this is their MO. They love the art of swaying votes. For the rest of us? Lobbying is uninteresting, boring, and notoriously emblematic of a complex bureaucracy meant to stifle progress and change.
It isn’t important to be involved in the legislative process.
Why should you care about lobbying? Why should you engage in the political process when it looks like everything else is falling apart? Why should you care about advocating for funding for an institution that is facing budget issue after budget issue? Especially if you’re only here for a few years? Once you graduate, do you really think you’ll remember these park blocks?
Business students don’t need to know how to interact with various regulatory authorities at all. Film, music, and art students don’t need to care about lobbying because public funding of the arts is super marginal in the grand scheme of things, right? Only the people who study public administration or political science programs should really care about lobbying, because that’s their passion, that’s what they signed up to do.
I hope you’re picking up on what I’m saying here.
If the sarcasm wasn’t thick enough, let me be transparent in saying that you absolutely should care about lobbying. No matter what you do, the decisions that come from the political process will impact you, regardless of if you are aware of it or not. Government, by design, has regulatory authority over almost every aspect of our daily lives. Governance isn’t attractive, it’s tedious, it’s messy, and saying it’s a process is an understatement to the methods we use in the United States to make decisions.
The next time you find yourself at a party, ask yourself if the vibe at the function would be better off with an in depth discussion about the intricacies of institutional governance and budget allocations. As a student rep on PSU’s Board, I can speak from experience when I say that the vibes would sour, because the realities of governance, and by extension, lobbying, are unappealing to the vast majority of people. No one casually wants to bring up interest rates from the Federal Reserve, the shade room on TikTok is not giving a play by play of the Department of Education’s budget, and Pop Crave certainly is not going to cover the exciting developments out of a House Judiciary meeting. However these things impact us in ways we are unaware of, or too uncomfortable to acknowledge.
The cultural zeitgeist, especially here in Oregon, tends to focus on what is happening at the federal level. Federal actions are only one part of the equation of how we exist in America. We often overlook the governance of local, municipal, and state governments because as we have established already, it’s boring as hell.
The American way of governance, in structure, is based on elected representatives, and the social contract between officials and their constituency is pretty transparent. However, this system of representation and accountability to the public falls apart when the public stops caring about the mundane. It’s this absence of public accountability and engagement that has landed Oregon to rank among the lowest in the nation in higher education expenditures, 44th place to be exact. Low investment levels like that manifest year after year, biennium after biennium, in tuition and fee hikes, intermixed budget problems that cause substantial cultural turbulence within institutions. Is this sounding familiar?
This continued decline in education investment exacerbates some of the very challenges Oregon faces, and introduces new ones that can have lasting ramifications if we don’t act. Should our state continue to underfund our universities, we will continue to see rising tuition costs (page 18), larger budget issues, and a continued strain on many public services that are already overwhelmed with demand. We will continue to see reductions in enrollment (page 36) that lead to reductions in staff and faculty headcounts, and we will continue to see the proportion of student debt increase exponentially by borrowers within Oregon, continuing the cycle of debt entrapment that plagues the modern workforce.
Higher education is one of the strongest mechanisms of economic stimulus a state government has in its toolkit. Funding for education is closely tied to boosts in economic activity, better health outcomes, and improvements in subjective life satisfaction. Many of the biggest challenges our cities and Oregon face can be solved through more investment in education that can help people on an individual level, and help solve systemic problems that impact our day to day lives. Our legislators know this, we just have to remind them, meaning, we have to do the boring part; Lobby.
While generalized lobbying can be effective, we have to be strategic with what we ask for, and luckily, there is a plan for advocacy. Every year, the Government Relations team out of the President’s office coordinates PSU Day at the Capitol, a day where PSU comes together, and does what most of us don’t: Lobby. Here are some of the things we are advocating for in our conversations with our legislators:
Preservation of Access to the Oregon Opportunity Grant
The public university system, not just PSU, is advocating for $150M in additional funding for Oregon’s main need-based financial aid program. This program funds essential aid that many lower-income students rely on to access their education, and this time, we’re advocating for an expansion of who qualifies for aid to include middle-income students.
Increase Investments in the Public University Support Fund
The public university system is advocating for a $275M increase to the PUSF for the next biennium to support access and affordability. These funds help support services that you and I, and countless other vikings access on a daily basis, including things like academic success services, and workforce connections for countless students.
Maintaining Strong Start/Summer Scholars programming
For new first-year students at PSU, you may have taken courses over the summer before your first fall term on campus, where you learned the ropes of navigating life as a college student, and were shown the services available to you to help you succeed. We know these courses overwhelmingly increase the rates of retention, and improve grade outcomes for students who are enrolled in the program. The public university system is asking for the continuation of funds for this successful program, to help make sure all students can be successful. Without the continuation of these funds, the future of Summer Scholars programming is uncertain.
These are just some of the programs that PSU is advocating for this year that can help combat the rate of low investment that our state has fallen into, but we all have to do our part to make it happen. While our government relations team is great (they are indeed very lovely people), legislators can easily dismiss their lobbying efforts because they know they aren’t the ones that will be affected by their decisions. It’s when students show up, look legislators in the eye, and communicate how they are affected that make real change. A legislator can put a face to a cause, a face to the direct result of the programs they are making investment decisions on, a face that will come across their mind when they cast their vote on the floor of the state legislature.
I know that the art of lobbying is unattractive and unappealing to most, but it’s the unattractive, unappealing, boring, tedious work that results in real change in our current system of governance. I’m not asking you to drive yourself down to the capitol to plead for these changes on your own (In fact, we’ll do the driving for you, and you’ll be in teams), but for you to join myself, and your fellow vikings in doing the boring work of asking our legislators to properly fund our education. All I’m asking for is one day of your time, one day to make a lasting impact on the future of these park blocks, for the future of our student experiences on campus, and for the future of the great State of Oregon.
Come join us on Thursday, May 22nd, 2025. We’ll drive you from campus to Salem, give you a rundown of how to advocate, provide a light breakfast, lunch, and you’ll even get a T-Shirt out of it. Beyond the scope of free food and t-shirts, you’ll gain experience working within the American regulatory system that can translate into tangible job skills, and the confidence that you are engaging with civics in the way our government was designed for.
However, if the plea of doing your part in engaging with civics isn’t a motivator, the uncomfortable truth about government remains, that what is decided in the halls of our state’s capital will impact you. Would you rather spend a day in Salem lobbying, or do you want to take on more debt for a worse experience?
Personally, I’d want less debt, but that’s just me.
PSU Day at the Capitol is on Thursday, May 22nd, 2025.You can learn more about Lobby Day efforts on the PSU Advocates website, or you can sign up now here.
AJ Romero-Gemmell is a Voting Student Representative on the Board of Trustees for Portland State University. You can learn more about the Board of Trustees by visiting pdx.edu/board.