Gen Z Is Shaken by Supreme Court Rulings on Student Loans, Abortion
(Bloomberg Law) -- The US Supreme Court has Taylor Porter questioning her career path, where she wants to live, and even the relationships around her as she enters her final year at the University of Texas.
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Porter, 20, wonders if she’ll be able to pursue plans to be a physician’s assistant and whether she should leave Texas, a red state, after the rulings all aligned with the court’s 6-3 conservative majority striking affirmative action, student loan forgiveness, and abortion rights.
“It feels like we’ve taken one step forward, three steps back,” said Porter.
Interviews with dozens of people in their late teens and early 20s around Washington and across the country in July suggest many members of Generation Z are struggling to decipher what the momentous decisions issued by the court in the past year mean for their life choices. This was particularly evident among women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ community members who spoke with, emailed, and texted with Bloomberg Law.
At more than 70 million strong, Gen Z is the most racially diverse generation yet, and people of color are most likely to bear the brunt of the rulings. Research says they face disproportionate challenges in accessing higher education and reproductive health care, and shoulder the most student loan debt.
“These programs were supposed to provide people opportunities that now they no longer have,” said Porter, who is Black and facing high five-figure student debt.
By The Numbers
Trust in the Supreme Court among Gen Z has dropped 10 percentage points since the spring of 2018, a Harvard University youth poll found in March, nine months after the abortion decision but before the student loan and affirmative action rulings.
The survey of 2,069 people between 18-29 found that 47% of respondents reported feeling “down, depressed, or hopeless.” The survey accounted for diversity in race, ethnicity, education, income, and geography.
“Young Americans feel like their rights are under attack,” said Ethan Jasny, the student chair of the Harvard Youth Poll and rising junior at the college.
Dobbs Decision
For Taylor Brown, 23, the court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion under Roe v. Wade was top of mind as she considered her plans to move to Atlanta and pursue a career in the city’s film industry.
The June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health has cleared the way for Georgia’s six-week abortion ban to take effect. A number of states led by conservatives have pushed sharply restrictive anti-abortion measures since Dobbs, prompting legal challenges.
Brown, who is Black, has always taken precautions to protect herself in her sex life, but limits to abortion access in Georgia have added another layer of fear to how she hopes to navigate dating there. She plans to be even more selective when it comes to sexual partners, in case she does become pregnant. “It’s just something that’s gonna stay in the back of my mind as I just live my life as a human being with desires,” she said.
Sophie Sikowski, 20, a junior at Central Michigan University majoring in human resources management, believes healthcare should be a right.
“After the abortion ruling came out, I kept thinking ‘What’s next?’” Sikowski said. “At this point I am scared for our generation.”
Media Impact
This isn’t the first time the Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions that particularly affected younger people, said Christopher Schmidt, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
In the late 1960s, for instance, the liberal Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down two landmark rulings on Vietnam War protests. One allowed students to wear black armbands at school, in a victory for free speech. The other upheld a law criminalizing the burning of draft cards.
One big difference today is that social media has saturated younger generations with content, making hot-button issues more immediate. Nearly 60 years ago, the pace and volume of news and information was delivered via print, TV, and radio. Headlines were impactful but Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram didn’t exist to magnify the moment.
“Social media and podcasts offer a great deal of commentary on the court, much aimed to not just inform but to also entertain and energize,” Schmidt said. “This is all quite new.”
Dobbs, which generated youth-led protests across the country, and the student loan and affirmative action decisions back-to-back in this term’s final two days, demonstrated to members of Gen Z for the first time the court’s powers and influence over their lives.
Education Access
The affirmative action and student debt forgiveness policies are a double blow for low-income Hispanic and Black students, who face some of the greatest barriers to quality K-12 education. They’d seen their college enrollment among 18- to 24-year-olds grow from 22% to 26% and 31% to 37%, respectively, between 2000 and 2018, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“I hope that people understand the scope of these decisions,” said Jin Hee Lee, director of the Strategic Initiatives department for the Legal Defense and Education Fund. “Gen-Z is the future of our country, so it is imperative that colleges form pipelines and open opportunities to all talent across the country.”
Authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court on June 30 ruled in Biden v. Nebraska that President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive $400 billion in student debt for 40 million borrowers was unconstitutional.
While members of Gen Z take out more student loans on average than Millennials, decades-long racial wealth gaps mean Black students take out $10,000 more in loans than their White counterparts on average, according to LDF data. They’re also more likely to struggle with paying back loans and subsequently default, the Brookings Institution found.
Black student borrowers were slated to receive 2.5 times as much cancellation under Biden’s plan than the average White household, according to JP Morgan research.
Loan forgiveness would have wiped out Kaira Smith’s $9,000 in debt as she prepared to apply to law school.
Smith, who works as a budget analyst in Washington and is Black, has given up on working outside of government for now. She said she hopes to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which requires 10 years of qualifying monthly payments for public sector employees.
“It is a sacrifice in some ways,” Smith, 23, said, “as I feel that I’m stuck in the role that I’m in.”
Other Viewpoints
Gen Z is on track to be the most educated generation, surpassing Millennials and Generation X, while typically being more progressive politically, according to Pew Research. But Gen Z isn’t a monolith, and some students of color hold nuanced views about the Supreme Court’s rulings and the potential impact on themselves or their families.
Rohun Barot, an incoming freshman at the University of Puget Sound, said he disagreed with the student loan and abortion decisions but thinks curbing affirmative action will bring a better future for Asian Americans.
In a ruling authored by Roberts, the conservative majority said June 29 in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard that affirmative action programs are in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Asian-American plaintiffs had argued the university’s admissions practices discriminated against them.
“With affirmative action, there was too much precedence given to other minorities,” said Barot, 18, who is Gujarati Indian. “Although it won’t affect me, it will affect where my younger brothers will be able to get an education.”
While upset about the abortion and student loans rulings as well, Aubriana Hills, 18, who will start her first year at Howard University this fall, also said the court made the right decision striking down affirmative action.
“It’s a hard double-sided coin, but I don’t think it should have been a thing to begin with,” Hills said. “At the end of the day going to college and getting a job should be about who is more qualified.”
Activism, Resiliency
The impact of Supreme Court decisions follow other defining events occurring in Gen Z’s formative years. Jasny of Harvard says the proliferation of school and other mass shootings, social unrest, and the pandemic have contributed to “generation-wide anxiety.”
But Jasny added Gen Z also is trying to affect change, mobilizing politically, and voting at high rates.
Research at Tufts University shows youth vote choices vary widely. But Gen Z is engaged in efforts to fight gun violence and racial injustice, especially backing Democrats. Young voters identifying as LGBTQ+, for instance, gave Democrats “extraordinary support” in 2022 midterms.
Porter, too, shows resilience as she weighs her next move influenced heavily by her looming debt burden. “I feel like I’m a realist,” she said. “But I’m not ready to fathom having to give up on being a physician’s assistant.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Tiana Headley at theadley@bloombergindustry.com; Olivia Cohen at ocohen@bloombergindustry.com
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Seth Stern at sstern@bloomberglaw.com; John Crawley at jcrawley@bloomberglaw.com
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