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
A Vision for Art in the 22nd Century
by frank
October 6, 2018
Dustin Yellin is the Founder of Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn and contemporary artist living in New York.
This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news at the Clocktower Studio.
frank: What does access mean for you, as far as this physical space and access to art in Brooklyn and around the world that you're providing?
Dustin: There is very much a proclivity in our society at the moment to modify learning, education and cultural production, so that's something that I think we are reacting to here. Pioneer Works is admission free, so all three floors of the building are completely free to the public. We expect about a million people to come through the doors in the next five years. 87% of our programming is free. I think that culture should be free. I think that the commons should still exist in our society and due to the modification of education and experience, as we've seen in so many different ways, that this ceasing to exist more and more in our country and so we want to fix that by creating a center for the sciences and for the arts that's accessible to everyone and building bridges into different parts of society that don't have that kind of access or exposure.
That's what Pioneer Works is – sort of a beta, a scalable 22nd century center for community anywhere. We'd like to build a micro Pioneer Works in shipping containers and put it down in refugee camps in Jordan and in townships in South Africa. We'd like to see Pioneer Works in Detroit, in Akron, in Oakland. We're looking at what does it take to build a new commons, a new center for community that could be in every neighborhood, a new place that's admission free and accessible everywhere. If you think about the future of cities and you're building a city from scratch, obviously you've got to build whatever the future version of a hospital is and a school is, but I also think that there should be the commons, there should be a place that everyone in the neighborhood can go, admission free, and get access to culture, to science, to learning if you will.
Is that the mission of Pioneer works then?
Dustin: The mission of Pioneer Works is to build community through arts and sciences to realize our human potential. We fulfill our mission at Pioneer Works by transcending disciplines and creating universal access to the arts and sciences to realize true social change.
And how does the internet play into this?
Dustin: We're building what I call responsible, digital echo, which is how you tear down the walls, the physical of what we're doing here and build. It took me a long time to come around to that because I love the analog, but how do you share, if you will, public brain trust of all these people that are coming through our campus with people around the world, so we're doing that by developing podcasts, music videos, digitizing the hundreds of articles that we publish, making it all available online.
Why do you want this, why are you doing this?
Dustin: I think that truly on our planet that socioeconomic inequality, geopolitical instability and division, religious division, division of humanity through these different schisms, is getting more and more amplified by our current political and economic structures. And I think that the antidote to that is art and science. I think the arts and sciences are the greatest agency we have, or glue, to bring people together. It's the one thing we have that gets everyone to a table unarmed. Whether they're Jewish and Palestinian, black and white, rich and poor; it doesn't make a difference. They're all gonna come around a fire, around a song, around a film, around a story. So how do we use storytelling to bring people together? That's why I'm doing this.
And how do we scale that storytelling and how, more importantly, perhaps, do we make that accessible to everyone? It shouldn't just be in a place that costs 25 dollars for entrance or two million dollars to buy a painting, or it shouldn't be about the fiscal piece, it should be about the learning and the curiosity and the wonder.
So, what's the greatest connectivity between the arts and the sciences? What's the greatest, best thread between the two?
Dustin: That's a hard question because I don't necessarily differentiate them. A lot of my friends who play music are also scientists or my friends who are scientists play music, or you know, there's different sort of philosophical discourse around scientific method and perhaps what we do when we make a painting or an experiment. But on a personal level, I just see nothing and something. I think that everything's invented, that civilization is an invention – that everything that we see, everything we experience, we've created. Therefore, it's hard for me to differentiate, if we're looking at mechanisms to make clean energy, or to build new types of buildings or to go to space, or under the ocean, or whatnot. I don't differentiate these things, I think they all inform each other.
So what are your greatest barriers to creating this?
Dustin: Unfortunately they're probably fiscal. It's that I have to run around like a crazy person and get the support we need to build the staff we need, to facilitate the programs that we're doing, so that for me is challenging cause I'd rather be writing or making art, or thinking, or, so you know, that amount of socialization of the ideas for support for the ideas opposed to the actual implementation of the programming, is challenging.
How do you think we can use art and science to better form the electorate?
Dustin: That's tough, probably because, well it'll inform it because our entire political system probably has to be reconstructed to a post-industrial, post-internet society and there hasn't really been an update to the operating system of our political structures. So, I would think that technology, science and the arts, as a storytelling tool, will help to build that new connective tissue; to rethink the way government works at this scale.
And you think, what specifically will help that? Besides a total breakdown in our system and a rebuilding.
Dustin: I always ask people, what are the three most pressing issues facing humanity. And I usually get the same three answers, which are: socioeconomic inequality, the ecological disaster that we are straight, smack at the beginning of and in the middle of, and then we can go out further, right, and we can talk about the nuclear issue, and we can talk about the potential of AI, and all these different scale problems facing humanity. But I actually think all those things are, that we can solve for all those things if we work together. But we can't work together as Americans and Chinese; we have to work together as a species, and so again the arts and sciences are maybe our greatest tool to humanize humanity again.
When we look at cycles of terror and violence, one of the first targets in those moments is art. Why?
Dustin: Because art is a tool to give voice to change, and therefore if there are systems of control and position, and therefore that can jeopardize those systems. I'm one of those folks that's just looking ahead, so I'm not gonna, yeah, we could you know...
So access is about the future, not about the past?
Dustin: I think we learn from the past, to tell stories that will inform the future.