Cancelling student debt isn’t just an economic issue but a racial justice one too, argued higher education leaders and policy makers in a Thursday virtual panel hosted by the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
The event was moderated by political commentator and former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives Bakari Sellers and concluded with remarks from U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
Panelists included Dr. Darrick Hamilton, professor of economics and urban policy at The New School; Dr. Fenaba Addo, professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Dr. Tom Shapiro, professor of law and social policy at Brandeis University; Hilary Shelton, senior vice president for advocacy and policy at the NAACP; and Ashley Harrington, director of federal advocacy at CRL.
As the U.S. shoulders $1.7 trillion in student debt, students of color are disproportionately burdened, noted the panelists who arrived armed with statistics highlighting the glaring disparity.
According to the Brookings Institute, Black students with bachelor’s degrees owe an average of $7,400 more in student debt than their White counterparts. And, as time passes, that gap widens. Four years after graduation, Black graduates owe almost twice as much as White graduates at $53,000, found Brookings.
Such racial disparities can largely be attributed to generational wealth, explained Addo whose research agenda focuses on how student debt exacerbates racial wealth disparities across generations.
“Black parents were less able to protect their young children from accumulating large debt burdens so there’s connection between racial wealth inequality and student debt burden,” said Addo. “In subsequent work, we found that these growing disparities between Black and White borrowers were contributing to ongoing racial wealth inequality within recent cohorts of young adults.”
