My community college students are the kinds of voters Democrats need to win

I am still amazed I can say this: I have a colleague in the White House. Jill Biden, whom students call “Dr. B,” is an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College, where she has made history by being the first first lady to continue her full-time job.

I wonder what she is hearing from her students on politics. In the essays I read as an English professor at Community College of Philadelphia, I have found that the community college student body is reliably, insightfully purple.

It makes me think that, to prepare for reelection campaigns, Democratic leaders should look to Dr. B, not just her husband, for insight into voters.

My students turn in essays against income inequality, for example, but I also get essays against raising the minimum wage. Students decry mass incarceration, but some advocate for the death penalty. Many are pro-choice, and many are pro-life. No one is in support of racial profiling, but I once brought in an article on systemic racism in the Chicago police force, which, in my mostly Black classroom, prompted both Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter commentary. I can’t remember if anyone in this class aspired to be a police officer, but I regularly have students who do. Others have worked in security, corrections, or law enforcement already, and speak from that perspective.

I stay out of arguments with my students. My job is to teach how to read critically and write compellingly. Yes, I often see faults and shortcomings in their essays, but this goes for papers with either liberal or conservative views. The greatest reward for me, in addition to helping my students improve their skills, is just hearing what they have to say.

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Community college students’ opinions may reflect more of a working-class point of view, but they also reflect how independently minded they are to be in college in the first place. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, 29% of our students are “first-generation” college students — trailblazers in their families. The average age is 27. In many ways they are thinking against the grain, even “the grain” of seeing our two-year schools only as a step toward four-year schools: 8% of our students already have a bachelor’s degree. Why are they at a community college? They may be applying for a master’s program that requires prerequisites they don’t have, or they are changing careers and need a certificate.

This mobile, independent mind of the community college student body is what makes it naturally purple — sometimes surprisingly so.

Another issue my students have written about over recent years is whether community college should be free. As a national initiative, this was introduced by Barack Obama in 2015, and it was a serious contender in Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill last year, before being officially nixed in February. Over the last year, in my English 101 classes, I handed out two op-eds, one in favor of free community college and one against it. My students analyzed how effectively the arguments were crafted, then gave their opinion in their conclusion.

Most wrote that free tuition sounds great, but a good number were against it. Why? Free tuition would devalue their education, they said. It would make the associate degree worth as much as a high school diploma — and they see how far that has gotten them. They argued that college is something students should work for and pay for. If it’s “given away for free,” it has no value.

Were they arguing against their own interests? Perhaps. We know from experience and mountains of data that our students struggle financially, which leads to academic struggles, too. But here is the lesson our Democratic leaders can take from my classes: My students will vote according to their opinions, not according to what we think their interests are.

When Democrats hit the campaign trails in earnest, they should tour America’s vast network of community colleges: 1,042 campuses nationwide, scattered across counties from urban and blue to red and rural, currently educating approximately 4.7 million students, down from the pre-pandemic 7.7 million.

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These students also increasingly vote. According to the Institute for Democracy in Higher Education at Tufts University, the voting rate for students enrolled in associates-granting colleges was 48% in 2016 and 56% in 2020. This lags behind the 66% average for all colleges and universities in 2020 (and the 66.8% turnout nationwide), but if we keep up the pace of our registration drives, we will be on par by the next presidential election.

When candidates visit community college campuses, they should make a point to listen to our independently minded, family-leading, working-class voters — ballots that Democrats need to retain or win back. A big shock of 2016 was in how little they knew the voting public, and candidates don’t want to make this same mistake again.

It’s also worth mentioning that community college faculty and staff vote, too. Just ask me or Dr. B.

Brian Goedde is an assistant professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia.