By: Johnny Perez

Posted: 4/24/08

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - Mike Huckabee strode into a banquet room at an elegant San Francisco hotel, clad in a dark suit and cowboy boots and filled with optimism about his long-shot presidential campaign.

California's liberal streak meant the former Arkansas governor and his slight Southern drawl were in somewhat hostile territory.

But the ever-conservative Huckabee still came to one of America's bluest cities on Jan. 31, days before one of the country's biggest set of presidential primaries, to woo potential voters with a sermon on his platform.

Twenty minutes into a discussion on illegal immigration, Iraq and the U.S. tax system, Huckabee stopped to air a grievance he had about the presidential debates.

Education - one of Huckabee's self-proclaimed passions and something he said "gives people the ticket to hit the next rung on the ladder" - wasn't getting enough attention from prospective candidates. Candidates weren't talking about education, he said.

"And it frustrates the fire out of me," he said.

Higher education reform, an issue deeply pertinent to college-aged voters, has been eclipsed by a quagmire in Iraq and a floundering economy.

Even young voters, who are participating in the political process more during this primary then ever before, have other priorities.

Young voters' first two concerns for the 2008 election were the Iraq war and health care reform, according to a Harvard University Institute of Politics study from 2007.

Education finished near the bottom of the list, the findings said, with apprehensions about the country's energy policy and economy.

After Huckabee's speech, inside a weathered lecture hall at the University of California, Berkeley, about 50 of the campus's Democrats held a lively mock caucus for their preferred candidates.

Dionne Jirachaikitti, a second-year public health major and supporter of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, stood outside the door to talk politics.

The issues Jirachaikitti first identified as most important were the war in Iraq and gay and reproductive rights, but she said higher education was a "huge issue."

Jirachaikitti's specific concerns included the increased costs of college attendance, limited access to higher education for students of color and limited funding for higher education institutions.

"No one really is talking about education," she said. "It's about the war and it's about health care."

Finding a specific area of higher education to improve, however, is more of a challenge.

"You need to pull it apart a little, because there are a bunch of aspects of higher education," said Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs and communications at The Education Trust, a education advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

"When I was growing up, we were the best-educated nation on the face of the Earth, and that is no longer true."

Additionally, an explosion of ethnic diversity in the United States is not being reflected in campus demographics, and access to higher education for minorities and lower-income students is constrained, Wilkins said.

Still, Wilkins said the key higher education-centered issue that needs to be addressed during the campaign is the cost of going to school.

In 2007-08, the average annual cost of attending a public four-year institution in the United States increased 6.6 percent from the previous year to $6,185, according to the College Board, a nonprofit education association based in New York City. Average rates at private four-year institutions increased 6.3 percent from last year to $23,712.

During the past decade, tuition at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has more than doubled, according to data from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"We have to set our priorities, and our priorities have to be getting those lower-income families to college," Wilkins said.

Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois have articulated the most detailed plans during their stump speeches and on their campaign Web sites.

Both Democratic candidates have proposed to enact college tax credits that would pay $3,500-$4,000 of students' total tuition bills, increase the maximum Pell Grant, simplify the process to apply for federal financial aid and give money to improve community colleges.

Obama supports cutting federal subsidies to private lenders. Clinton wants to increase the scholarship college students who participate in the AmeriCorps program for a year receive to $10,000.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate, has mentioned higher education, but has focused on building an educational platform based on K-12 education.

Wilkins said current proposals to cut the cost of higher education weren't enough.

"The affordability issue isn't being addressed in a way that responds to the situations families are facing," Wilkins said.

While the dollars and cents of higher education have received some attention in candidates' press releases and campaign speeches, higher ed's limited prominence in the campaign has come as no surprise to some observers.

"I guess candidates don't feel like they have to thrust our issues, because we don't put pressure on them," said Carmen Berkley, vice president of the United States Student Association, a student advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

"It would also force the candidates to say a lot of tough decisions that they don't want to say - I think that presidential candidates shy away from it, and historically candidates have ignored students and issues of 18- to 24-year-olds," she said.

Newly-invigorated youth voters are responsible for making candidates pay attention and tackle higher education concerns from the federal level, Berkley said.

Wilkins agreed, but said the country's colleges and universities could not sit idly by, waiting for a new administration to provide direction.

"I don't want for a minute to suggest that individual institutions need to wait for the next president to address these problems," Wilkins said. "They shouldn't wait for Hillary, McCain or Obama to do this to them, they should be proactive."