Eleven University students made their way to UCLA’s campus last week to attend the United States Students Association’s 63rd Annual National Student Congress.
Hundreds of student delegates representing 400 campuses and more than 4 million college students nationwide flocked to Los Angeles last Thursday and will be in attendance through tomorrow when the newly elected Board of Directors holds its first meeting. The University’s delegation will help elect the association’s 2010-2011 Pacific Northwest
Region Chair, and its new president and vice president, and will help deliberate upon and craft USSA’s agenda for the following year.
USSA is the country’s oldest and largest national student association, and its congress serves as a forum for student government leaders and activists to network, attends workshops, practice lobbying skills and discuss issues pertaining to post-secondary education.
Robert Greene, the current Pacific Northwest Region chair and the former ASUO federal affairs coordinator, has acted throughout the last year as a liaison between the board of directors and USSA’s constituents. He will be able to run for the chair position again if he chooses.
Greene has voiced support for several pieces of federal higher education legislation, including the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM) and the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA).
The DREAM Act is a proposed piece of legislation, introduced in the U.S. Senate in March 2009, which provides certain illegal immigrant minors who have graduated from American high schools an opportunity to attain “conditional permanent residency” to earn a college degree.
At the National Student Congress, the USSA members are celebrating the success of
SAFRA, a House of Representatives-introduced bill passed last year that expands the maximum amount of Pell Grant awards to $5,500 in 2010 and ends the practice of federally subsidized private loans.
“Students are graduating with an average of $40,000 of debt, and we have been subsidizing banks to do what the government should be doing in the first place,” Greene said. “So, we switched over to a direct loan program and saved $61 billion in taxpayer dollars that will be reinvested back into Pell Grants.”
University delegation leader and ASUO vice president Maneesh Arora, enjoys the mingling aspect of the congress, where students can form a “statewide, region-wide and nationwide coalition.”
“One of the biggest pluses is networking,” Arora said. “We get to meet other student leaders and bounce ideas back and forth.”
By now, student nominees have presented their speeches and, as of 3 p.m. Sunday, the delegates had elected University of Massachusetts at Amhurst’s Lindsay McCluskey as USSA’s new president and UC Santa Cruz’s Víctor Sánchez as its vice president.
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