Student loan companies belonging to ALEC adds injurious insult to injury.
Considering that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pushes legislation specifically targeting the financial futures and voting rights of college students, you can see why college students might object to paying large piles of money to an ALEC member. So, in the case of student loan company Sallie Mae, students did something about it: They organized and
successfully pressured Sallie Mae to quit ALEC.
In August, at ALEC's Annual Meeting in Chicago, organizers with the Student Labor Action Project and the United States Students Association gathered nearly 14,000 signatures on a petition demanding Sallie Mae drop its ALEC membership. A few months earlier, in May, at least 200 student activists protested outside Sallie Mae’s annual shareholder meeting, demanding that it end its relationship with ALEC and increase transparency about its other lobbying and political activities.
The announcement that Sallie Mae dumped ALEC came quietly, in a September 7 article in the Delaware News-Journal.
“The noise level was distracting from the original business purpose,” said Martha Holler, a senior vice president at Sallie Mae. “We will pursue other venues in which to share our collections expertise with state and local governments, and hopefully now our discussions with students ... can focus on what matters most to us all, the success of our education loan customers.”
ALEC has worked to increase the national student loan burden by promoting for-profit colleges that rely overwhelmingly on student debt and has pushed voter suppression laws that disproportionately affect students. Not that Sallie Mae is in business to support and nurture students, but constantly sending student loan payments to a company that's taken part in targeting you and your peers in that way would be pretty damn galling.
This makes 50 corporations to dump ALEC in the past year and a half.