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
Defining Terrorism
by Victor Asal
August 7, 2018
This interview was orignially conducted and published in frank on April 28, 2018.
This interview with Victor Asal, a professor and chair of public administration at Rockafeller College University of Albany, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place April 16, 2018.
My name is Victor Asal, I’m a professor of political science and Chair of Public Administartion at Rockafeller College at University of Albany, State University of New York.
I have three main areas of research. My first area of research is why people would go 400 miles out of their way to blow up people they’ve never met before. So criminal justice most times, most homicides are committed by people who know the other people. But going and killing people you’ve never met before, why would specific organizations do that? What are their strategies? That’s one area of research that I focus on.
My other area of research is why people are discriminated against by the State or by societies. Why are some people treated badly just because of the color of their skin, or their gender, or their sexual identity? I research all of those areas there.
These two areas of research are definitely connected.
My third area of research is the area of pedagogy in political science. What are effective ways of teaching students about political concepts, about the theories of politics? Specifically in the areas that I research. I’m a big fan of games, excerices, simulations — making a student a lab rat in their own experiment is much more useful than discussing why did Stalin do this? If I have an excersise where you are Stalin, and you did it, everyone else in class can ask you to explain it, it can be a different understanding.
Related to political violence I spent a great deal of time focusing on collecting new data that allows us to get traction under analysis on the organizational level, within a couple different contexts. The area of violent non-state actors. Why do certain organizations turn to violence? And when they do, why are some organizations much more lethal than other organizations? One of the things that I’ve found in my research is strong support for an argument that Ted Gurr made 47 years ago, about why men rebel.
There were a lot of people who disputed this and argued about this — but there's been growing literature that’s been focusing at the ethnic group level, that this is true, that this is one of the drivers of the use of political violence. I’ve been looking at this at the organizational level using a dataset called Minorities Risk Organizational Behavior dataset. And that’s ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East and North Africa that claim to represent an ethnopolitical group, minority group. From the analysis, some of them are violent, some of them are not violent.
Can you tell me who some of them are?
Hammas, Amal, the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), lots of different organizations, again some are violent, some are not, and some go back and forth.
That makes sense.
The other data set, that really is the genesis of myself and colleague, Karl Rethemeyer here at U Albany, is the Big Allied and Dangerous data set, which has the acronym BAAD. The BAAD Dataset is the dataset of organizations that have already turned to violence, that are using violence, and to be able to look at why some of them are so much more lethal than others, or use CBRN weapons [chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear ] in terrorism and such.
One of the interesting things that we’re finding is that organizations that are networked tend to be much more lethal than organizations that are not networked.
What do you mean by networked?
Having allies. For example, how many things have you gotten by knowing somebody?
Nearly everything.
Right, so we’re finding that that’s true of organizations also. Organizations that have connections tend to be more lethal, tend to get a lot more done, in a lot of different ways. Friends can be very, very helpful.
The other thing that we’re finding is that organizations that are lethal tend to generate more rivals. There’s a cycle process. But there's another issue here, that really drives these organizations, and that’s ideology. There’s some really interesting theoretical and case study work by a guy named Mark Juergensmeyer. He talks about how ideology can compel organizations and people to kill. Because they have this power of othering…have you ever seen the movie Aliens?
No.
You should see the movie Aliens. It's a great movie. Our heroine, Ripley, she’s trying to protect this young girl from aliens. And the aliens are these sentient, intelligent creatures, that have this unpleasant habit of eating humans. Ripley stumbles into a nursery of baby aliens. I mentioned that the aliens are intelligent beings?
Yes.
If I can build an ideology that makes me the good guy, and makes you evil, or not really even human — that enables me to say I can kill as many of you as I want, and I can kill as many civilians as I want. So ideology, particularly religious ideology, has an important impact. And the combination of religious and ethnonaturalist ideology have a very, very important impact on the behavior of these organizations.
The issue of killing civilians gets at one of the core debates we are having about terrorism. Because the term terrorism can be used in many ways. And there are lots of people who use the term terrorism to describe any violent organization they don’t like. Those are the terrorists, these are the good guys. And if you’re trying to study this phenomena from an analytical, theoretical perspective, in my mind that is highly problematic. Because what that means is the definition of what we’re looking at is whether we like you or not. And that might be a great definition for seventh grade friendships, but not a great definition for doing analysis.
And there are big debates about what, and how we should capture terrorism, even if we’re talking about it in an analytical fashion.
How would you like to define it [terrorism]?
So I define terrorism not by if I like you or don’t like you. I define terroism by, are you a political organization, with a political motivation, who is blowing people up, and specifically targeting civilians?
Intentionally targeting civilians.
Yes. Intentionally targeting civilians, to hurt and kill civilians. Now, there are organizations that are insurgent organizations that target soldiers, there are organizations, terrorist organizations, that intentionally target civilians, and there are lots of organizations that do both.
It's one thing to shoot somebody in uniform, I don’t have to like it, especially if I’m wearing a uniform, but I would consider that very different behavior than blowing up a nursery school.
How do you feel about US military action, especially in the Middle East, where they are not fighting people in uniform?
When I say uniform I am using it prosaically — I’m saying fighters.
Any figher? Even if they happen to be a civilian?
If they are in a militia, they’re fighters.
Let me very clear here, there's another distinction about terrorism, when people talk about terrorism, mostly what they’re talking about is non-state actors. There is a whole discussion about State terrorism. In my mind, if the State is intentionally targeting civilians, they are involved in State terrorism. But again, that's a controversial topic as well. Which gets back to my other focus, which is political discrimination and political oppression. When it comes to violence, I primarily look at non-state actors. Both insurgents and terrorist organizations, and what factors are pushing towards targeting civilians and other kinds of behavior. But States can be pretty awful. And if we want to compare which kind of organizations, between non-state actors and States, which have killed the most amount of civilians, there is no contest. Russia did a phenomical job under Stalin slaughtering millions of people. Hitler. I mean, we could go on and on about States. There have been States that have been lax, and have killed civilians by being lax, and not paying attention. And there have been States that have intentionally targeted civilians, who they meant to kill.
Do you think your research can help inform policy or military action in dealing with these organizations?
I would hope so. One of the key aspects of the kind of data I’m collecting is that it can help you identify who to be most worried about. You should know that most terrorist organizations don’t kill anybody because they are fairly incompetent. And very few kill many people.
A really sad example of this is the invasion of Iraq. Where the U.S conquered Iraq and then fired the entire military, and put them out of jobs, and took them out of organizational structure, and that was a big mistake. Oppression in general is not a smart policy.
What are the fundamentals of understanding terrorism as you define it?
I think there’s normative components here, and empirical components. When it comes to thinking about terrorism,
Try to understand why these organizations are doing this, strategies to make them stop is important, and something we need to be paying attention to. And being able to draw a distinction between violent organizations, we may or may not not like their ideology, but they are not killing civilians. It's important to make the distinction between organizations that maybe you do like, that might be killing civilians. A concrete example is John Brown. His goal was to stop slavery. I am in favor of stopping slavery. John Brown slaughtered civilians. Intentionally. That makes him, in my mind, a terrorist, whether I like his ideology or not. Being able to make that distinction is important both analytically, but also normatively, for how we understand the world around us.