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
The Life Work of Senator Rodriguez, Part Two
by Senator Rodriguez
July 12, 2018
This interview with Senator Rodriguez, who represents District 29 in El Paso, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place June 28, 2018. This is part one of an ongoing conversation between frank and Senator Rodriguez.
Tatti: We want to clarify the immigration conversation, because what we’re hearing is actually a conflation of lots of issues, and I think it’s detrimental to a real debate about policy.
Sen. Rodriguez: Exactly, you're question earlier was, do you think that there was confusion about the various policies? And the answer is, there is confusion in the American mind. People in any place out of the border, who don't have a sense of what the border is like, what life on the border is like, the reality of border communities, all their impressions of border and border people like myself and immigrants are negative because of the purposeful misinformation that is being put out by politicians and others who are anti-immigrant.
There is no question that there's conflation of refugee versus regular economic immigrants coming in from Mexico or any place else, versus border security with regard to the cartels, human smugglers, the criminal elements, and the category of terrorists.
We never had terrorists come through the Southern border. With regard to the Central American refugees, those are people who the public needs to generally understand are either seeking asylum or are refugees running away from violence or persecution in their countries.
Under our federal laws, long standing policy, international law, anybody who is seeking asylum or refugee status, can legally come up to our ports of entry and legally enter and make an application. They’re supposed to be allowed to be in the country during the period of time that their application winds its way until a final decision. In the meantime when they're here, they're placed with relatives, they’re placed with organizations that care for refugees and people seeking asylum. That's been the long standing policy and process until now. Now we are criminalizing people seeking asylum, everyday I see the headlines, including this morning, of the border patrol stopping people at the middle of the ports of entry, but they have a right to come over and petition, and they’re keeping them from coming over and coming in to petition. Then with the zero tolerance policy under Trump, now separating the children from the mothers, filing criminal charges against the mothers who are seeking asylum status.
With regard to Mexican immigrants, economic immigrants, the long standing migration of Mexicans into this country because of what I said earlier, the demand for labor, what the immigration experts call the push pull factors of economic reality. We need labor? We welcome them in. We don't need them anymore, we push them out.
With respect to whether or not we need comprehensive immigration reform, what do we do with people who have been here without documents for all these years? The estimates have been from 11 to 12 million.
I did some of that work. Pro-bono legalization appeals for some of those who were eligible. A lot of my farm worker clients for example, who have been here without documentation, working for years, paying taxes, contributing to the economy, we got them green cards, permanent legal, permanent resident status.
We have moved from that attitude towards legalization, to a time when amnesty is a bad word for republicans and where we are treating everybody under Trump as a criminal, as a rapist, as a person that should not be tolerated in this country.
All of the rhetoric about immigrants being criminals and harming people and taking jobs away, has caused us to lose sight of doing a humane comprehensive immigration reform that we tried to do several times in the past. The latest one being back in 2006. We did it under Reagan, the Simpson–Mazzoli Act. It was the 1986 immigration reform, what was referred to the Simpson–Mazzoli Act because of the legislators in the senate that passed it.
We've always said that we were going to provide several prongs to comprehensive immigration reform. Legalize the people that are here already, that have paid taxes, that haven't committed crimes, that are contributing to society and of course I always throw in have learned English. Fine. There was the legalization part of it, there was the guest worker part of it to provide permits for workers that were needed by the farmers, by the industry. That was another aspect to it.
The third aspect was to look at our visa system and see what reforms we could make with it. If you are a legal permanent resident, you want to have your parents or your brothers or relatives because our policy on immigration has always been based on family reunification, family ties get priority, now we've gone away from that. The immigration system got so bogged down that they took 10, 20 years for people to bring a relative into the country.
We have gotten away from those because now any discussion about comprehensive immigration reform, even with respect to the dreamers, the republicans don't want to allow them to have citizenship status down the line. That's new. That's something that a lot of people don't pick up on. You guys should emphasize. It used to be that when we talked about comprehensive immigration reform, including republicans on a bipartisan basis, if we were going to do a path to a legalization program we were going to have a path to citizenship. It may take a while, but you were going to be given the opportunity.
All of these things are now combined, confused, nobody distinguishes between an asylum seeker or refugee and an economic migrant and a dreamer. Or dare I say, the criminal elements. There's all these people coming over to do us harm, take away our jobs. That is an incredible shift in State policy toward immigrants in this country. We're starting to look no different than Europe that is trying to find ways to keep those economic migrants and refugees from coming into their countries.
The day before yesterday I was over there with the American Federation of Teachers and a lot of different faith organization, Rabbis, Baptists, Catholics, Muslim clerics. We were there for that last Sunday. We're going to go tomorrow. We're coordinating it for New Mexico State Legislators. New Mexico wants to do it's part and they’re bringing doctors and state legislators and Native Americans. A friend of mine who's a state legislator out of Albuquerque, filed a complaint with the United Nations and she wants to come with all of these folks and read it there at the port of entry and then come and do a visit with our Annunciation House over here in El Paso.
What gives me hope is that at these events, we have run into people from Canada, elderly people, people from Florida, from New York, from Alaska. That is what’s heartening.
Once the new justice gets appointed, of the stripe of Roberts, I'm sorry here young people, but you are going to see some hard times in terms of national policies.
A veering to the right like we have never seen in this country and the way the white nationalist movement is going, and the racists in this country, starting with the President, are going, we may be be looking at past years in Italy, Germany, France and other places where people rose against the different people in this country. Whether your difference is color, whether your difference is your sexual orientation, whether your difference is your religion. I'm painting I know a very black dire scenario, but I'm a student of history, I like politics.
I'm a policy wonk and I know what people have gone through in world history and in this country and what we can expect, if we as people do not rise and assert ourselves.
Finally, your question about Beto and Cruz debating, I don't expect that Cruz is going to want to debate him on the immigration issue. If he does, he's just gonna stay to a very canned message. He files a bill himself to try to keep families from being separated so he can then in the campaign say, I don't support families being separated. Yes, but he supports the President block step and the President is separating families. So he should be held accountable regardless of what he says or what he does. That's my view on Mr. Cruz.