#RolandMartinUnfiltered - Student Loan Debt Crisis Threatens An Entire Generation Of Students Of Color And Their Families

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

The Student loan debt crisis is threatening a generation of college students of color and their families. The amount of outstanding debt and the number of borrowers affected have a significant impact on this country's economic well-being. The people most affected are Blacks and other minorities. This week, The Center for Responsible Lending and the NAACP released a report that outlined the problem. Ashley Harrington, Senior Policy Counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending spoke with Roland Martin about the student debt crisis and how it is a clear and present danger to African American college students. Watch the 7.25.19 edition of #RolandMartinUnfiltered https://youtu.be/lUFj5RrHTBA - #RolandMartinUnfiltered partner: 420 Real Estate, LLC To invest in 420 Real Estate’s legal Hemp-CBD Crowdfunding Campaign go to http://marijuanastock.org Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. You can make this possible. All right, folks, every black parent wants to see their child get the best possible education after high school graduation. Too often, the money is just not there. And that's where student loans come into play. The amount of outstanding debt and the number of borrowers affected have a significant impact on this country's economic well-being. Of course, the people most affected are black folks and other people of color. This week, the Center for Responsible Lending and the NAACP released a report that outlines the problem. And so we're going to talk about that. First, I want to go to my panel, Dr. Greg Carr.

I'll start with you. Look, you're a professor there at Howard University. And give folks an understanding of what you have witnessed yourself over these years as the cost of higher ed has increased. Have you seen a corresponding increase on the pressure, depression, anxiety, if you will, of your students just to be able to get through and afford that degree? Absolutely. You go around in the DMV, you know, into D.C., Maryland and Virginia, and you see so many of, and I think we're all in the same age range, we could work our way through school with a job. That's impossible now. That's impossible. It's either you got a

scholarship or you got a ridiculous loan, which then saddles your family with debt. And these are not debts that can be forgiven. And it has impact on everything from their academic performance to their capacity to concentrate even on their post-graduation plans. And when you settle them finally with that kind of debt, that's a lifetime of debt. We're not talking about something to be paid off in 10 or 15 years. Even the Obamas only paid off their student debts after he was in the U.S. Senate. So, no, yeah, we see it every day, Roland. It's ridiculous.

Julian Malveaux, you were president of Bennett College. I remember working for WBON Radio and getting one of your distressed phone calls saying, we've got to raise $30,000 by X date to keep these young women who are seniors in school, to keep them online

to graduate. And I really think there are people today who are not in college, who also don't have kids who are in college, really don't understand how this thing has changed completely in the last 20 to 30 years. You know, Roland, I went to Boston College on a full ride. The tuition was like $2,500. It was affordable. I had a little part-time job.

But now as Greg said, I have students who are working 40 hours a week. They're working full-time. I had a child who was running a car wash. She was the manager of a car wash, and she was in school, and she was pledging, and she was cray-cray. I mean, she was just basic. she was pledging and she was cray cray. I mean, she really she was just basically she was sleeping two hours a night. The worst thing about it is, as all of this has occurred, the Pell Grant has been fairly steady. It has not gone up with tuitions. Tuitions have gone up faster than the rate of inflation. Not only are we saddling folks

for a lifetime, we're distorting their life choices. So if you have a law, you graduate with fifty thousand dollars worth of loans. OK, are you going to take the job on Wall Street? Are you going to be a social worker? You're going to take the job that provides you with the most money because you might want to be a social worker. You love social work. You love people. But you have to pay those loans. Right. I think so. Elizabeth Warren, some of the people were talking about free tuition. President Obama, who talked about reducing paying a percentage of your income on on the loan. All of those things make sense. But parents and students, I mean, the pressure is enormous. And we do say, you know, we want folks to go to college.

We want. But many people just simply cannot afford it or people are doing things. I have a friend who says his kids can go to college, but they got to go to community college first, so he could save that money for them to do four year. He's adamant about it. He said, unless you get a full ride, you will go to community college, we will save some money and then you'll be able to go to your four year. His thing is, look, if you graduate from Harvard, you still got a Harvard degree, even though you started out at San Francisco Community College.

So the pressure is just enormous. The Center for Responsible Lending does very good work. And there's a lot of policy stuff in there that we need to really follow up on. I want to bring in right now Ashley Harrington. She is senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. Ashley, this is, of course, a huge issue impacting so many people. Student loan debt is exceeding a trillion dollars. And so what must people learn from this report that you all put together with the NAACP? Roland, thanks so much for having me. I agree with all the comments that are made so far, and we really need to talk about this as a national crisis. It's a civil rights issue, economic justice issue, but we are really on the verge of a national crisis that's going to affect our entire economy and in fact already is.

Because of student debt, people are delaying buying homes, they're delaying starting businesses, they're delaying starting saving for retirement. And so these are effects that are going to be felt beyond just individual families and individuals. These are going to affect the community and the large society as a whole. And so we need to really be thinking about the fact that there is over $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt held by 44 million Americans and that the default numbers are significantly high and particularly high for students of color and black students in particular.

And we need to be concerned about that and recognize how we got here. And so what do we do, though? I mean, you have the candidates who are saying one thing, but the reality is Congress could act right now and they simply haven't. Absolutely. So we advocate for a number of solutions. One, we need to streamline repayment, right? The repayment system right now is completely wacky. There are numerous repayment plans. Even income-based repayment plan is hard to access. Each plan has a different amount of what you would pay.

So it needs to be completely streamlined. We need to get down to one plan that in the income-based repayment plan that really is based off 8% of your discretionary income instead of 10% or more. Because even under the current income-based system, we have seen that it's been completely unaffordable for many borrowers who are having to forego other necessities in order to make their student loan payments because we know that the consequences of default on student loans are pretty severe. You can get your social security check offset. You can get your wages garnished. You can get your tax refunds garnished. And so we are seeing that happen. So we'd like to see the repayment plan drastically changed. We need to hold student loan services accountable.

And one big thing we're advocating for is there does need to be large-scale, across-the-board debt cancellation. Even as low as $10,000 would have a significant impact on the ability of people to really contribute to this economy and to get back on track with their student debt. Michael Brown, what I don't understand, it's a whole bunch of white folks out there who voted for Trump who broke his head and would support debt cancellation. And, you know, you wonder why this thing hasn't really blown up, how it really hasn't gotten effective.

Donald Trump, frankly, hasn't done a damn thing in this area. In fact, Betsy DeVos in the Department of Education, his secretary, has allowed, frankly, the profiteers from for-profit colleges, folks who have been ripping folks off to come back in, removing a lot of the constraints put on them by the Obama administration. And so do you expect this to be a significant part of this campaign? And is it something that if you're a Democrat, you should be running hard on? Because this thing affects black, white,

Latino, Asian, Native American, doesn't matter, men, women, gay, straight folks from every region of the country. They should be talking about it a lot. And there's several reasons. And we've talked about this before. We had the chat about the returning citizens voting in Florida. And there was this perception that it was kind of like a black thing. And that's why a lot of the white folks in the panhandle weren't getting involved. Same thing with this. Folks think it's all, this is a black Latino thing.

It doesn't really impact me. But as you mentioned, whether there's a lot of white folks in Appalachia that would love to get their school and college debt retired. So yes, it needs to be an issue, but that messaging has to be more encompassing than when you talk about, oh, this will help black people. Yes, it'll help black people. But when you're running for president,

you have to help all the people. And yes, you can care about certain segments. Clearly, 45 cares about a certain segment. But you have to run and be part of the whole community that you're running for. And so you can mention it. You have to talk about it. And you have to have surrogates that do that for you that don't look like you necessarily. They can go into those communities and talk about it. So, yes, they should be talking about it. It should be part of anybody's campaign.

Ashley, final comment. I think he's absolutely right. In 2016, nearly 70% of all graduating seniors had student debt. So this is a universal problem and there's things we can do about it. We can do income, we can do broad cancellation, we can drastically increase the Pell Grant and we can find a way to do debt-free college and we must it's a national imperative that we do so all right we truly appreciate it thank you so very much thank you all right folks back to our unfiltered video in just one moment all right folks you've heard me talk a lot about marijuana stock.org why because i want to keep you informed of investment opportunities that make sense we have all watched the growth of the cannabis industry. A recent report by New Frontier Data estimates the global cannabis market at over $340 billion. We know that marijuana legalization is sweeping the country state by state.

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