Apparently, Policy is Dying. Now What?

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that policy debate is losing steam. Just looking at the data from the Harvard National Speech and Debate Tournament (which is arguably the biggest tournament in debate that isn’t Tournament of Champions or Nationals) in both 2019 and 2024, it becomes incredibly apparent that policy has lower numbers of competitors, unmatched by virtually any other event. In 2019, the total number of policy debaters that attended the tournament was 366, or 183 teams. In 2024, that number was 284 (142 teams). And that’s counting 40 novice entries and 5 in round robin, neither of which even existed as a potential field in 2019. To compare with other debate events in the same tournament, Lincoln-Douglas went from 532 people in 2019 to 454 in 2024. Public Forum went from 1,790 people to 2,030.

It’s worth noting that Lincoln-Douglas lost similar numbers of debaters as  policy did, but from a numerical standpoint- that’s still 200 more people than policy has, and thus the belief that “policy is dying” was born. Since there are fewer competitors, policy exclusive tournaments become far and few in between.

Put simply, less and less tournaments are offering policy as an event option in the first place. As someone who’s competed in the event for four years now, I’ll often stalk tabroom to look for tournaments to compete in. It’s far too often that I won’t be able to compete due to lack of accessibility. Whether it’s because it’s impossible to get there physically, because it’s just too expensive, or because they don’t allow independent entries, there always seems to be a reason for me to not compete. But that’s an issue within all of debate, not just policy. However, there’s one problem that’s especially glaring in the policy community- a lack of resources available.

Policy debate has the steepest learning curve of any event. It isn’t enough to understand niche arguments within a topic- you need to know virtually everything. And this is where debate camps come in. Nearly all of the most accomplished teams go to one. It makes sense- the summer is the perfect time to prepare for next year’s topic and simultaneously jump the hurdle that the learning curve is. I know firsthand how important it is to attend these camps, and I’d recommend that kind of one-on-one attention to skills to anyone who’d listen. But there’s a catch. These camps are all incredibly costly, and the most helpful ones often are upwards of $1,000 for just one week. And while online camps do exist, reasonably priced ones don’t. For example, Harvard’s online camp is $1,499 for two weeks. Even though a good majority of said camps do offer scholarships, it’s still a lot of money. But while the sheer price of camps does often contribute to the inaccessible nature of policy debate, the biggest problem is an extreme lack of resources available for debaters to learn to master their craft. Yeah, the current resources are decent, but they’re locked behind a paywall nine times out of ten.

I recognize that I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to have access to the resources I mentioned above, but it’s important to recognize that many people are stuck- they want to be better, but can’t afford the egregious price tag that comes with it. From my experience, a lot of debaters who do policy only do policy. Because of this, I feel like the policy community exists within its own circle, so debaters don’t realize what they’re missing out on. As a colorblind person, I’ll often get comments similar to “It must be so sad not being able to see the difference between red and orange,” but people don’t realize I've never known anything but my perception of colors. It’s the same thing in policy.

The only reason I even figured out that we have almost no easily accessible resources was because I started competing in congress. Despite having three years of experience in policy, I wasn’t prepared for what congress was like AT ALL. So, I turned to the internet, expecting to have the familiar struggles that I had when I was a policy novice. To say I was shocked at the wide array of resources I suddenly had at my fingertips would absolutely be an understatement. For the first time, I realized just why I almost quit debate time and time again- I didn’t have the options readily available to help myself get better. I know that we, as a community of debaters, can make a change in the current environment we’ve built.

Making our community more universally accessible isn’t going to be the easiest task, though. For a lot of debaters, including myself, the fact that policy requires a highly intense level of understanding actually draws me in. But for some reason, we take pride in how hard it is to learn policy, without ever considering the impact of that learning curve. But I know that there’s a way debaters ourselves can keep our event going- engage our novices more. Debate is really daunting on its own, and adding policy’s own flair unfortunately causes a lot of people to run screaming. Novice year is the most important year a debater can have, and I think all events tend to forget that, since novice year is almost always remembered as the disaster that was the first tournament, and then everything else is blocked out. Every debater has an embarrassing story from their first tournament. But the important part is that we moved on. I’ll be the first person to tell you about how I’ve had two “first” tournaments, and they both sucked. But re-experiencing my novice year made me realize how important it is to have accessible resources, whether it be through EIF’s free Congress tutoring, through helpful blogs, or simply through the option to have open discussions with the top debaters. We should work to create similar resources for the policy community.

Because I wanted to see the perspective of an exclusively policy debater on this issue, I turned to Kavin Bendre. Bendre is in his fifth year of policy debate, and champed the JV division at Harvard last year. He expressed not only the same frustrations that I have with debate summer camps, but raised a new argument, pointing out that Kritiks inherently make the event more accessible, due to requiring less prep, and debaters get to argue about something they're passionate about.

And this is, in theory, true. However, in round, another story is told. People run Kritiks, or K’s, that they know they’ll win on, versus actually highlighting an issue within society that they care about. It’s fairly common that teams don’t even understand the K that they’re running. Why? K’s are fairly difficult to understand and near impossible to master. And since the resources I mentioned above are fairly inaccessible, teams often struggle quite a bit. So, I’m going to say something fairly controversial. Bring passion back to policy, and stop running K’s that you don’t care about.

While I understand K’s exist in both Public Forum and Lincoln-Douglas and that they function relatively similarly, due to policy’s learning curve, it’s much more of a blatant issue among policy debaters. This is not an attack on the theory of tech over truth, let me be clear. I am a big fan of tech over truth, and it’s frankly needed due to policy’s obsession with linking everything to mass extinction or nuclear warfare. However, tech over truth shouldn't encourage lack of passion or research falling to the side, in fact, it should be the opposite.

So, is policy debate really dying? Kind of. It really does depend on who you ask, and what statistics you look at. For example, TOC this year has 96 policy entries. But last year it had 93, and the year prior 101. To me, this is still a large jump from 2019's 78 entries, when it was harder to get into TOC. Since 2019, bids have been not only more commonplace, but also easier to acquire.

But it’s also important to note that in 2022, when the TOC was hosted online, the most competitors in the past decade attended. When debate was hosted online, it was ten times more accessible. As we start to see the first group of novices that never had an online debate experience, the inequality in policy becomes really apparent and numbers once again fall.

But whether or not policy is actually dying, the importance of equality burns ever more bright. I’m exhausted by the inequity in policy, and it's time to do something about it. If policy is dying, let's revive it,  as a community.