When Melanie Stein, a freshman fashion design major, would receive her paycheck each week from her summer job, she first looked at how much she earned, then read over the check to see how much was taken for taxes.

No matter how many hours she worked, one tax always was significantly higher than the rest – the Social Security tax.

‘When I worked in the summer, they took out for Social Security, but I’m not going to see it,’ Stein said. ‘When I’m older, how do we know we’re going to get anything?’

With the baby boomer generation – people born between 1946 and 1964 – nearing retirement, Social Security will give out more money than it collects within the next ten years. This means today’s college students will receive only a fraction of the benefits current retirees receive.

And while President George W. Bush is campaigning to create private Social Security accounts and the AARP, a special interest group for senior citizens, started its own campaign to keep Social Security the way it is, the only group of people that does not seem to have an opinion on the future of Social Security is the group it affects the most – college students.

‘To most students, it’s not the sexiest campaign in the world,’ said Timothy Marvin, project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group. ‘Who’s thinking about Social Security when they’re 20? But the people who are making the decisions aren’t affected by it. It’s the students who are affected. We need to get students’ voices involved.’

And while experts agree college students should be concerned about what happens to Social Security, many students avoid the subject.

Charles Duprey, the chairman of the SU College Republicans and a senior finance and history major, said he believes students would become more concerned with Social Security reform if they understood the problem with the current system.

‘It hasn’t been properly explained,’ Duprey said. ‘They should be worried. Many people don’t know how the system works. It’s not a terribly exciting thing, but if it’s explained to them, they’ll understand they should be concerned.’

Campus groups such as NYPIRG are starting programs to educate students about Social Security reform and encourage them to solve problems with the system. NYPIRG plans to sponsor an event in late March that will inform students about the intricacies of Social Security and the effect each of the current proposals will have on students.

The event is tentatively named ‘Monte Carlo Social Security Night.’ NYPIRG plans to decorate the room with bright lights and roulette wheels to give the students in attendance the feeling they are in a casino.

With Bush’s new Social Security plan, taxpayers would put the Social Security tax in their own private account. They would be free to invest the money however they pleased.

But with the chance of earning more money on the stock market also comes more risk. Opponents of Bush’s proposal say it would be like gambling the money at a casino.

‘The point is that huge changes are a huge gamble,’ Marvin said. ‘You don’t want to be risky with people’s futures.’

College students should especially be concerned about the safety of the money they are putting into the system, said Jerry Evensky, an economics professor at SU. The current Social Security system is pay-as-you-go, meaning younger generations pay for the generations that precede them.

With private accounts, everything that is put into Social Security could be lost due to a stock market crash.

‘(Social Security) used to be ‘if all else fails, I got this,” Evensky said. ‘Now if all else fails, everything fails.’

For many students, including the unpredictable stock market in Social Security would further complicate an already elaborate system.

Private accounts would force people to educate themselves about money markets, and that would favor the people who are already well off, said Jordan Zakarin, an SU College Democrats spokesperson.

‘They would recalculate benefits,’ Zakarin said. ‘The people who make money are the ones that already have it. They’re the ones that know how to use the stock market.’

The longer a reform is put off, though, the more money current college students will have to pay to fix Social Security’s problems, said Gary Engelhardt, an economics professor at SU.

‘If you’re a college student, you should be incredibly concerned,’ Engelhardt said. ‘Something should be done now to make the baby boomers pay as much as possible. They’re going to be retiring soon and there aren’t going to be as many workers. The longer it takes to create reform, the less the baby boomers pay for it.’

Published on February 19, 2005 at 12:00 pm