interviews
Student Debt on HBCU Campuses
by Lodriguez Murray
September 29, 2020
This interview with Lodriguez Murray, the Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at UNCF, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Lodriguez | UNCF is an organization, started in 1944, dedicated to supporting historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) — both the students and the schools. We provide financial support to our 37 member schools, we do a lot of work to benefit the whole of HBCUs, and every year, we award upwards of $100 million scholarship to 10,000 students at 1,100 different colleges and universities.
frank | There is a student loan debt crisis. What does the crisis look like for HBCU students in particular?
We know that HBCU students carry more debt, but many people stop the explanation there. When we stop the conversation there, it makes it seem like these schools are more expensive or more onerous for the students that choose to attend.
HBCU students carry more debt because the students are, by and large, the progeny of slaves. The debt disparity is more of a commentary on the economic injustices African-Americans have experienced over the decades, than it is a commentary on the schools.
Students at HBCUs carry more debt because those students come from statistically lower socioeconomic backgrounds than students at other schools. 75% of our student population is Pell Grant eligible. That is 20 percentage points more than at a predominantly white institution (PWI). At some of our schools upwards of 90% of our students are Pell-eligible.
Is the disparity solely within the amount that HBCU students carry, or are there differences in the interest rates and the types of loans they have?
81% of HBCU students receive some type of loan assistance to go to school. And the types of loans do really matter.
A study came out earlier this year that compared HBCU graduates with PWI graduates of the same age, same job, same income, and the same amount of loans. The students attending HBCUs were charged a higher interest rate on their loans.
We call that the HBCU paradox. Our students, because of the type of institution they chose, are "taxed" for their choice.
What explains the difference in interest rates?
To explain that, you have to look at the systematic racism in our country. Black people have a harder time accessing capital. That's a statistical fact. And when Black people access capital, it often happens at the worst rates terms and conditions.
There are financial institutions that have seen us as risky in the past, and you can extrapolate from there to understand what financial institutions do by looking at the name of the college that a student has attended.
Can you talk about the role that Parent PLUS loans play on HBCU campuses?
About half of our students in 2020 are first-generation college students. Families are doing all they can to make college happen for their kids, but due to the economic situation of many of these families have very few options. When other financial aid options are exhausted, folks look to Parent PLUS loans.
We have a sorted history with the Parent PLUS loans at UNCF. We recognize the need for students to access capital to attend school, but we also recognize the need to improve elements of the loan to make it less predatory.
One of the things you should know about that program is that it is an option that many African American students use to access education. You should also know that the Obama administration changed the rules for Parent PLUS loans to require a nearly perfect credit score in order to obtain a Parent PLUS loan. That change completely hampered the HBCU community. It negatively impacted about 400,000 students nationwide. We saw a significant decline in enrollment at HBCUs, which was financially devastating to our community.
We know that African Americans have a harder time accessing capital, and when they access it, it is at the worst rates.
So, why would you punish people who, because of their historic relationship with financial institutions, have had to accept capital at the worst rates? We fought with Congress and the administration to improve their calculations around who could access the Parent PLUS loans.
With that said, certain things should be done to improve Parent PLUS loans, and all other loans, so they no longer cause such harm to students and families.
What changes do you advocate for as an organization?
We believe student and parent loan interest rates should be reduced. We believe the origination fees should be eliminated. We believe loan interest subsidies should remain for low-income students. We believe there should be streamlined loan payment options, and that income-based loan repayment should be automatic. And we believe the federal government should make it easier for students to refinance their loans to have lower interest rates.
We believe in improving and expanding the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. There are a lot of HBCU students that are teachers, police, officers, firefighters.
Those graduates should have access to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, but the program has been close to ineffective, no matter which administration is runnig it.
And no one has a good explanation for the program is not working well. It seems like someone's not being held accountable. There are many of students whose loans should be paid down as we speak, but they are not because that program is not working well.
Do you advocate for debt forgiveness?
We believe in debt forgiveness, but we believe it should be progressive. Why would we automatically forgive the loans of a graduate who is making $300,000 and can easily pay their loans? That makes it harder to forgive the loans of a teacher who is two years out of school making $40,000.
And when you say makes it harder — what do you mean?
It will be a bigger number and that bigger number will be harder for Congress and the American people to swallow. But if you prioritize graduates who make less money, then it is a much more attractive policymaking item.
How does the federal funding of HBCUs play into this story?
Congress invests a certain amount of money on an annual basis to help subsidize the schools. They recognize that, despite years of underfunding, HBCUs educate civilians from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and graduate them at higher rates than more well-resourced institutions.
But we know that HBCUs have been under-invested in, period.
That was especially evident when states and the federal government pulled back from investing in higher education after the Great Recession. In recent years, we have seen some reversal of that trend, but not enough to combat the chronic underinvestment in the institutions. And by chronic, I mean buildings need repairs and there are students who should have scholarships but don’t have them.
We need both the federal government and the philanthropic community to invest more in these schools. And we need to recognize that investment in our institutions yields more of a return than investment in those schools that have a billion-dollar endowment.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were all bracing for a draconian year. After the death of George Floyd, the philanthropic community saw HBCUs and our organization as a way to right social ills. They came to us with donations, and with that money, we will be able to support more students than ever before. We've had the really largest philanthropic boom ever.
The CEO of Netflix and his wife personally gave $121 million, with $40 million going to the UNFC, $40 million going to Morehouse College, and $40 million to Spellman. Mackenzie Scott gave tens of millions of dollars to HBCUs. These kinds of moves have been terribly helpful to break the cyclical pattern.
I wonder if there are ways that you would advocate for the federal government to also fill that gap?
As a matter of fact, every major presidential candidate had policy proposals that benefited HBCUs. And we were able to educate them and convince them certain policies from four years ago were stale. For example, now all candidates, have free college proposals that include private HBCUs, as opposed to only including public institutions.
The major campaigns that remain have proposals regarding HBCU. Both political conventions prominently featured and mentioned HBCUs. That is something that has not always happened. That's not the par for the course for us. We are experiencing a new wave of people and a new wave of interest in a particular type of institution.
At first glance, you might say, do I even need to do a story on this small number of schools? But once you look at the actual impact of the schools it is evident these few schools are doing so much more than anyone would ever expect. These schools are only 3% of all the higher education institutions in the country, but they graduate around 10% of African-American bachelor's recipients. In the states where they are located, they educate a quarter of the Black graduates and they produce nearly 40% of all the Black STEM graduates. When you put those schools together and you have nearly a $15 billion economic impact on the country a year.
These schools really punch above their weight.
interviews
In Conversation with Hannah Teicher
by Hannah Teicher
May 31, 2018
How did the path you're on now begin?
By 2014, things had transitioned in the sustainability field towards an emphasis on climate change. I did a project looking at how the real estate industry in Boston was adapting, or if they were, because it seemed like city governments weren't doing enough. And it seemed like real estate companies should have major vested interest in doing something.
They seemed to be doing something, but still just the bare minimum, the low hanging fruit, and mostly disaster response or disaster preparedness.
I was lucky to see an ad for the Dutch Dialogues in Norfolk, Virginia.
Why is it called the Dutch Dialogues?
bringing Dutch experts to U.S. cities. It was started in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina by a big architecture and urban planning firm down there, Waggonner and Ball, that has led flood infrastructure projects since then. They had been looking at the Dutch example, and began this workshop process to bring Dutch and local experts together. To think about how you could address flooding in a more innovative and integrated way— and a way that wasn't necessarily typical of American design.
They replicated the process in Norfolk, because Norfolk is also one of the cities on the East Coast that is very vulnerable to sea-level rise. I went and it was a really interesting process. I was somewhat critical of the design approach, it was a little bit facile and convenient at times.
Right.
It's not that easy to turn a street into a canal.
So that's what really got me interested in the intersection of the defense presence and climate change. That's how I came to the topic I'm looking at in my dissertation.
Which is?
Urban defense collaborations for adaptation to climate change.
So, the Department of Defense and climate change.
Yeah. It's a tricky topic because I'm always concerned that people will see me as somehow being pro-military by looking at this but that's -
The idea that studying the military is in any way advocating for the military is ridiculous.
Ok, they are a hugely powerful institution in American society and they have a huge amount of money at their disposal. I wondered to what extent that could be a resource, and whether communities could leverage a military presence for adaptation.
And what's the conclusion been?
So far, I think there's a qualifying yes. It's one avenue that cities can take. New York City has Wall Street, other cities have other resources. This is one way some smaller cities, secondary and tertiary cities, might be able to get access to more dollars and federal resources. In Norfolk right now, there are several joint planning processes going on between multiple bases and municipalities that seem promising. They're actually sponsored by the Office of Economic Adjustment, which now appears to be on the chopping block. One of these vestiges of the welfare state, and Republicans have gotten hip to that. They're like, oh we can ax that too.
Does the DOD have a line item in the budget for environmental research?
No, not at all.
If anything, what they do is mainstream environmental and climate efforts into their larger codes and plans. That seems to be a way to make it more neutral, non-political, and less vulnerable to being axed.
The perspective I tend to hear is they're concerned about any and every threat. Clearly, climate change is a threat, sea-level rise, drought, whatever climate impacts. They're all a threat. They're going to be aware of those and plan for those.
What defines the community, and what is the difference between, let's say, the physical community adjacent to Norfolk, and someone's individual mission to be a leader in climate change adaptation?
When I say community I'm using it very loosely, and not how it's always used in planning.
I'm talking about what city elites are doing. And they seem to be the ones championing this. For obvious reasons, they have the power and the resources and the networks to do things.
But those efforts won't get where they want to go without larger, systemic support?
Without federal support. Right now, especially with us withdrawing from Paris, there's this huge move to want to say that cities are the answer, and cities can do it on their own. But cities don't have the resources for this scale of infrastructure. Whether it's gray infrastructure or green infrastructure, it requires a huge amount of money, and cities don't have that. That's why they need federal resources.
I do look to the Dutch model and other European models in terms of more comprehensive spatial planning, where it's not this fragmented effort.
We need comprehensive spatial planning, though I can't foresee that happening here.
The spatial planning toolkit seems to have been born out of the Army Corps and looking at nature as a threat. Is pushing adaptation out of the DOD furthering one idea that might actually be maladaptive?
That's always a big risk. Highly likely. The culture within the Army Corps is changing. Of course, the Army Corps is fairly de-centralized too. They are a bunch of different districts. I spoke to people in the Army Corps in the Norfolk district and there's definitely an interest there in starting to integrate these nature-based solutions. But their procedures are slow to catch up, so they have these ossified cost-benefit ratios that they use, and those don't really allow for adequate evaluation of what green infrastructure can do. But there is an awareness of that, and an effort to change that.
How does the conversation between the Army Corps and the Department of Defense happen?
That’s an interesting inflection point. I see the Army Corps as potentially being this boundary organization that does work across military and civil agendas— though they try very hard to keep them separate. There have been some efforts to bridge that, because it's clear, in the case of a large Naval base, that you can't just put a wall around the Naval base, or off the coast of the naval base, and then leave the rest vulnerable. It's been a really strong theme with almost everyone that I talked to. They realize there is inter-dependence between the bases and the communities, largely because of transportation.
It's really obvious. Roads get flooded and people can't get to the base. Most people who work on the base live off the base. There have been some lobbying efforts now to try to be able to bridge that fence-line. One of them is through Army Corps means. There's also a new initiative I found out about recently called the Sea-Wall Coalition. They're trying to expand defense access roads policy to infrastructure. It already allows military spending off-base to improve roads. All of these are very long term efforts, none of the change is going to happen quickly.
In resilience planning, you hear the rhetoric of ‘protect critical infrastructure first.’ Which can be used to justify protecting only the naval base.
All of this has a big risk. I don't think it's a necessarily good solution to open up defense spending to be able to be spent off-base, because clearly it's still going to protect certain interests, and it's not going to protect a lot more vulnerable people in the community.
Can you talk about the idea of threat and threat-multiplying, and how climate plays into the view of threat both at home and abroad?
2003 was the first defense report that was doing future scenario planning about climate change. It was Sherri Goodman who had been at the DOD and is now a defense analyst at the Wilson Center. She coined the term threat multiplier for climate change with the specific intent of getting political momentum behind that, and it seemed to really work. Convincing people that climate change itself wasn't going to cause conflict, but it would enhance all of the other drivers of conflict that might be out there. That's the basic thesis.
If you already had things that might be causing migration or resource wars, then climate will just enhance that, and it is much more of a international or geo-political view rather than a domestic view. That's one thing I'm trying to bring to this. Look more at the urban, and more at the domestic interface of military, climate change, and communities.
Some cities that are more advanced have formal relationships and procedures where they meet on a regular basis. The city and the base both let each other know about their plans.
How do you plan on getting this message out there?
What I'm most interested in coming out of this is how can communities partner with unlikely allies? I see the military as being one. But there are other ones. It really gets at best practices for collaboration and working together, and what can support that, and even what kind of political messages might help to do that. Climate security framing is really interesting from that perspective because it does seem to help bridge a partisan divide on climate change. It helps to reach a more conservative audience. There is also some potential for backlash against that, but from what I've been hearing on the ground, it sounds like it has been somewhat effective.
We’re not gonna talk about who's causing this...
Yes.
We'll skip that conversation, and that's a good way of getting past it.
Avoiding causes is kind of across the board, especially for more conservative audiences. But then the climate security angle, specifically saying that this is a threat to national security. When you have top military brass on the stage saying that, more people are going to listen than otherwise would.
Really my message coming out of this isn't that the military is some kind of cure-all. It's just one avenue to pursue. Another avenue that could be really interesting is the large hospital systems. They're also invested in having to weather disaster, and having to be there for the long-term. There's the whole public health argument for climate change.
I view that as potentially being very parallel.