USC-area lawmakers talk student issues
Officials discussed support of affirmative action, college affordability and destigmatizing mental health.
By BENJAMIN GAMSON
The Daily Trojan sat down last week with California State Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas and Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer — who both represent the area USC is situated in — to cover an array of topics pertinent to college students, from affordable housing to affirmative action to mental health.
Smallwood-Cuevas has represented the 28th district in the California State Senate since 2022. The district encompasses parts of downtown Los Angeles and South Central, including the USC campus. Before she was in the Senate, Smallwood-Cuevas served as the project director of the UCLA Labor Center, where she led the Center for the Advancement of Racial Equity. She also co-founded the L.A. Black Worker Center at UCLA.
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Jones-Sawyer, a USC alum who graduated in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in public administration, has represented the 59th district in the California State Assembly since 2012. Prior to being elected to the Assembly, Jones-Sawyer served as director of asset management and assistant deputy mayor for the City of L.A., and vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 721. He is also running in the 2024 race for L.A. City Council District 10.
These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Trojan: In June, the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in college admissions. What did you make of this decision, and what, if anything, are you doing in response that affects California universities and USC?
Lola Smallwood-Cuevas: Unfortunately, California has a long track record of dealing with this issue, dating back to Proposition 209, which effectively banned affirmative action in the late ’90s. I remember being at UCLA, where there was one Black person admitted to the law school that year as a result of Prop 209. We in California have to retool and reinvest in what I believe is strategic enforcement of civil rights laws now.
We’ve got a Supreme Court that is working diligently to roll back the protection of women’s reproductive rights, affirmative action and civil rights, the Voting Rights Act, and so many environmental gains, and so it is on us at the state level to hold the line. Particularly, as the most diverse state in the nation, we have to lead the way in terms of equity and diversity and inclusion.
I did have a bill that did not make it out of appropriations. We turned it into a two-year bill, which is Senate Bill 16. The purpose of that bill is to really reimagine our civil rights enforcement, and to do what we did around wage theft — where we built coalitions between local enforcement entities and state enforcement entities — and build out a seamless enforcement strategy that really puts more boots on the ground for enforcement. It allows local communities to enforce civil rights laws where discrimination is happening, whether it’s our public institutions, our public employment, public contracting, housing. We have to reimagine a civil rights enforcement regime that is far more robust and vigorous in the lives of residents locally.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: We need to do more, especially when it comes to disadvantaged individuals, to try to ensure that they are able to become part of the university system. Look, I went to USC. I was one of those disadvantaged students that got to the campus. Not only did I learn a lot about other people, other cultures and the diversity that USC brought, I think people learned about me and about people who come from disadvantaged communities, and it probably got rid of a lot of preconceived biases that people had about people who come from my particular background and vice versa.
I don’t believe in closing off individuals who are qualified, I just want to make sure you understand that, because I got that same kind of look when I went to USC. It’s whether or not I was actually qualified to be there, whether or not I was an affirmative action choice, and that I was brought in because of the color of my skin.
But once I competed with other individuals at the university, they realized that not only did I qualify, but in many respects, especially when I made the dean’s list, they realized that I was more qualified to be there than some of the other ones that may have gone to better schools, had better environments, better upbringing, and definitely had more money and resources than I ever had.
Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer said his time at USC helped shape his understanding of affirmative action and college affordability. (Office of Reggie Jones-Sawyer)
DT: Something that is on the mind of a lot of USC students is affordable housing in the communities surrounding USC. What solutions do you have regarding building affordable housing?
LSC: I represent South Central L.A., which was home to some of the last remaining affordable housing units in our city, and these units are quickly being flipped and turned into market-rate housing that is just out of reach, not just for the working residents, but particularly for students in and around USC and around UCLA. We want to make sure that we’re investing in housing.
We also want to make sure that we are removing any of the barriers and, sometimes, we know that there are efforts to use things like the California Environmental Quality Act to prevent affordable and student housing from being built. We passed the bill this year to make sure that was protected, and we want to make sure that we don’t have unnecessary duplicative barriers that prevent us from building the housing that we know our students need, but really our communities deserve.
RJS: I am a parent that’s acutely aware of that, because I have a son that’s going to college right now. I’m actually dealing with that cost right now for my child. He’s lucky and fortunate to have a parent that can at least afford to try to pay for all that for him, so that all he has to do is study and go to school every day and take care of his academic requirements.
But not everybody has that. And I remember struggling to be able to make ends meet when I was an undergrad. I thought paying $600 or $500 a month for rent was astronomical back when I went to school. I’m hearing that that cost could be three or four times more for the same amount of square footage now.
I believe we need to provide some kind of additional funding or additional money to create the kind of affordable housing that makes it so that students are able to live and study without the worry that they may have to live on someone’s couch, that they may be out on the street, that they may have to be homeless while they’re studying to get their undergraduate degree.
At the end of the day, when you graduate with a degree, it is so much better for society that we’re able to get those people out to society to help with all the societal ills that we have. It’s a travesty, and so I think subsidies are a major way we can make that happen.
DT: USC tuition is among the highest in the nation, with a full year living and taking classes at the University totaling upward of $90,000. What are your priorities when it comes to the rising cost of college tuition and, as a result, the amount of student loans that students are taking out?
LSC: One of the things we’ve tried to do is to really double down on our middle-class scholarships and grants, and make sure that we are investing in our grant systems for very low income students as well. How do we make college free for those folks who are at the most disadvantaged economic rung on the ladder in our communities?
We also know that there is a need for supporting universities to bring down overall tuition costs. We certainly have done that in our public institutions — where we have augmented funding in response to universities who came to us with budget proposals that were going to increase the overall tuition — and we’re working to ensure that we have some debt relief, even though it is being challenged in the courts.
RJS: There’s a myriad of different ways we could handle this. And we’re suggesting that if you go into psychology, social work, dealing with people with mental health or behavioral challenges, that if you go to a California State University or a University of California school, and you commit yourself, almost like a Peace Corps type of program, that we can retire your debt at the UC and CSU’s level. It would be great if we could expand that to USC, so that we now have a battalion or an army of mental health professionals that deal with the most urgent crisis that we have in society right now. That’s dealing with homelessness.
If we could get all of those individuals from the USC School of Social Work and psychology to go out to the community to commit themselves to three to five years to helping cure homelessness — I think the benefit of that outweighs the cost of what would go to USC and the benefit to communities is so overwhelming.
Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas’ message to students anxious about future job prospects and the cost of living increasing is to vote. Systemic issues like gentrification, she said, cause increased costs of living for students. (BenFranske / Wikimedia Commons)
DT: Today in California, many workers are on strike fighting for higher wages and better benefits. The cost of living is high in the state, and jobs are less secure. What is your message to college students — based on the work you have done in this field — who are anxious about job security and the cost of living in the future?
LSC: I want to say: vote. Voting matters because there’s no silver bullet for this — it is a matter of the real estate market and the speculation and the gentrification driving up costs in places where students or recently graduated students can live. It’s also an economy where workers’ wages, the average wage, has been flat for the last 40 years compared to CEO pay, which has seen a 500% increase over the last 40 years.
I was really proud to be a principal co-author on Senate Bill 150, which calls in communities that are disproportionately impacted with unemployment and underemployment and underrepresented populations to say they should have a set-aside for any investment in infrastructure, so that we are bringing folks up. At the same time, we — with SB-150 — also carved out another layer of community benefit and labor standards in the manufacturing side.
As we’re building turbines, as we’re building micro grids, we are going to need engineers, we’re going to need mechanics, we’re going to need everyone as a spectrum to really make sure that we hit our climate resiliency goals. So as we’re building this new economy, we don’t want those to be poverty low-wage jobs — we want them to come into quality family-sustaining jobs.
The state of California just passed the minimum wage for health care workers, which the governor signed, so we have at least a $25-an-hour floor. In South Central L.A., a studio apartment is now $2,200. Every worker is going to need to earn a living wage to be able to afford to live in our communities.
RJS: When you look at the polling that’s been done, when people start asking, “Why are so many unions right now out on strike?” There’s a lot of empathy for them because they know that the wages that they’re earning now cannot keep pace with inflation and cannot keep pace with the cost of living here in California, and we need to do something more to make that happen. Otherwise, the people who we depend on for some of the most essential services won’t be around or have to leave the state, and that’s the last thing we want. We want everyone here to be able to thrive here in L.A. and California.
DT: Turning over to talk about mental health. What is your message to students struggling with their mental health and what have you done in the State Senate for those struggling?
LSC: We have to make sure that students have the support and the help that they need. We were a big advocate in maintaining the investment in preparing our social workers and mental health care workers. We supported Senate Bill 11 with my ally Caroline Menjivar in the Senate, where we make sure that we are meeting the level of mental health staffing ratios to the number of students who need help. We have to have all-time mental health care providers as we are required to have to touch at least 1,500 students, and the state of California was falling below that, particularly on our CSU campuses.
I was proud to support that bill and to make sure that we got SB-11 over the finish line. We need to train the next generation of healthcare workers, make sure that we are paying healthcare workers a living wage and then ensure that we, as the State of California, are making good on our staffing ratios, particularly on our college campuses, because we need this generation to be healthy.
RJS: We don’t provide them what they need to be able to deal with that, and so I encourage that we get more money into not only the UCs and the CSUs and the community colleges, but we need to have more mental health and acceptance of mental health on our campuses.
If you get a cold or flu, you go straight to the health center. We need to make sure that if people are feeling feelings of suicide — I mean, that right there bothers me more than anything else, especially someone that has all of this promise, and they’re in college, and they’re considering suicide as a way to deal with their stress and anxiety — you need to be able to talk people through that, we need to speak up and help them, and we need to give them the space to know that going to talk to a mental health professional is not a shameful thing. It is the most important thing that you could ever do in your life. We need to obviously provide more mental health professionals on all our universities and campuses, but we also need to change the culture of whether or not you go there.
