As college students, our future success depends, in part, on what our elected officials do in Washington today. For this reason, everyone should vote in the upcoming presidential election.

At this point, both President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney have outlined their strategies for the next four years, and the choice is ours to make.

Our post-graduation world depends primarily on job availability, student loan debt and the fiscal position of the United States. Just over half of bachelor’s degree holders under the age of 25 were unemployed or underemployed last year, according to an Associated Press report.

But this makes no sense. From day one we were told that a college degree is the best investment one can make. But this is not automatically the case. Job outlook matters.

The poor fortunes of half of us are, in part, caused by the clamoring of most of us for increasingly lower student loan rates and government student loan forgiveness. This clamoring means votes for elected officials who comply.

Free money sure sounds nice, but this is a problem. The lower the rates go and more the government forgives, the less we need to think about paying off our loans and hence, the less we concern ourselves with which majors translate into job opportunities.

In other words, the government assumes an increasing amount of student lending risk so we can ignore it. This is exactly why half of us will likely be jobless or without the job we expected, and Obama wants to keep playing this game.

Obama wants us to vote for him because he will have the government keep handing us cheap money. It’s pandering, and we must reject it.

Romney understands that “a flood of federal dollars is driving up tuition and burdening too many young Americans with substantial debt and too few opportunities” — a good summation of the situation.

And Romney is in good company. “There is increasing concern that many students may be getting their loans for the wrong reasons, or that borrowers — and lenders — have unrealistic expectations of borrowers’ future earnings,” according to Moody’s Analytics.

Moody’s also reports “the long-run outlook for student lending and borrowers remains worrisome,” and “unlike other segments of the consumer credit economy, student loans have not demonstrated much improvement in performance despite some improvement in the broader economy.”

In other words, the myth has been busted that pouring ever-increasing amounts of government money into higher education is an investment in our future. Doing so causes tuition price inflation, more debt and post-graduation lower employment.

Despite this, Obama and the left continue urging us to clamor for more, even as we dig ourselves further into debt.

A few sentences buried in Obama’s 2013 Analytical Perspectives budget document say it all. “Beyond 2022 … the fiscal position (of the United States) gradually deteriorates mainly because of the aging of the population and the high continuing cost of the Government’s health programs … the deficit continues to rise for the next 75 years.”

We are the next 75 years, and this is proof positive that we should all vote for Romney.

Michael Stikkel is a junior computer engineering major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at mcstikke@syr.edu.

Published on October 31, 2012 at 1:00 am