I have no dog in this fight. Neither I, nor any member of my family have student loans. I finally finished paying my student debt off in 2007, 35 years after I began incurring that debt. As a result I have some sympathy for the Sisyphean task today’s students are confronting in trying to retire their debt.
More importantly nobody lied to me as I was trying to decide what, if anything, I wanted to study after high school or where I wanted to study and how I was going to pay for it. I got very fine counseling every step of the way. My counselors worked diligently forcing me to consider all my options. One bluntly said to me, “I know you come from a military family and are serving as a Warrant Officer in the Cadet Corps but have you considered you could be killed or maimed paying the military back for your education?”
The best advice I got though was that my career goal was essentially impossible. I wanted to be a tenure track University Professor. The already long odds of my achieving that were further reduced because I was a late addition to the post war baby boom. The academic jobs were filling up fast with young professors born before me with more arriving with PhDs every day. As a result of that prescient advice I wasn’t too surprised to discover how dire the situation was when I eventually completed my PhD.
My advisors also pointed out my lifetime earning prospects and employability would be better served as a Heavy Duty mechanic. My favorite high school teacher Mac, who taught me Ag Mechanics and Economics bet me I would end up farming or ranching no matter what I decided to study, where I went to school or how I funded my education. When I was appalled by the very idea he said, “you have grown up watching your family breed championship bulls and cows. You know how genetics works. Your family bred you to be a rancher. And then they trained you.”
The generation of students that followed me were sold a load of hogs-wallop. Utter total nonsense. Education is no guarantee of happiness, job security, or lifetime income. And it barely moves the needle on gender and racial wage gaps. Hell, call a spade a spade, it makes it worse.
I knew going in that the benefit of higher education for me was it would expose me to the bigger, wider world. This was what I wanted. The military route fit right into helping achieve that.
But even while I was in university things began to change. Claims for the material value of a degree became more and more common. The educational industrial complex began selling higher education not as an opportunity but as a panacea for all society’s ills. They were ably supported in this by well meaning members of every part of elite society.
Meanwhile governments defunded higher education as fast as their greedy little fingers could draw red lines through the educational budget. The logic was flawed from its inception. “Higher education is correlated with higher lifetime earnings. Thus, students who are going to institutes of higher learning are gaining a leg up on others who don’t or can’t go to such institutions. We shouldn’t be using our tax money to create winners and losers. Let’s make them pay the full freight for their education. We’ll lend them the necessary money and stop funding higher education.”
The flaw lies in the fact the Higher Education lauded in the first statement was created and maintained by the funding removed in the last statement. Tuitions shot up. Ancillary fees sky rocketed as institutions of higher education competed for students, particularly those that added points to the institutions prestige rankings. They kept adding amenities and services and then added a markup to those costs. Of course recruiting boomed and administrative and management positions grew like algal bloom and those costs got marked up.
Next thing you know total student debt in the United States is over $1.5 Trillion dollars. And the upper mobility once believed to spring inevitably from higher education ran straight into first the Great Recession and then the Pandemic. To top things off a few years before the shit really hit the fan Senator Biden and a bunch of his colleagues decided students should no longer be able to get discharged from student loans through bankruptcy.
In other words generations of students got shafted. They are disproportionately Black and Brown. This is because they have to borrow more because they have less to begin with. And they have a harder time finding work after graduation and make less when they do find work than white graduates of the same programs. As the Brookings Institute explains:
The moment they earn their bachelor’s degrees, black college graduates owe $7,400 more on average than their white peers ($23,400 versus $16,000, including non-borrowers in the averages). But over the next few years, the black-white debt gap more than triples to a whopping $25,000. Differences in interest accrual and graduate school borrowing lead to black graduates holding nearly $53,000 in student loan debt four years after graduation—almost twice as much as their white counterparts. While previous work has documented racial disparities in student borrowing, delinquencies, and defaults, in this report we provide new evidence that racial gaps in total debt are far larger than even recent reports have recognized, far larger now than in the past, and correlated with troubling trends in the economy and in the for-profit sector. We conclude with a discussion of policy implications.
Another group disproportionately burdened by student debt is women. And that is radically understating the case.
According to the American Association of University Women 2/3rds of student debt is held by women.
Recent graduates are facing the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression — and women are faring worse than men. In the early weeks of the pandemic, women filed nearly 59% of unemployment claims, despite being only half of the labor force.
The growing cost of education compounds the problem. While college attendance is at a record high, the price tag of college education has more than doubled over the past generation. At the same time, household incomes have barely budged.
Women take about two years longer than men to repay student loans. From the moment women graduate from college, most face a gender pay gap — which widens as they age. This makes it even harder to pay off their larger share of student debt.
The global pandemic is also likely to stretch recent grads who rely on side jobs to repay student loans, save for a rainy day or simply make ends meet.
As a result, women may put off saving for retirement, buying a home or starting a business.
For those of you who don’t see where I am going the set of female students and the set of Black and Brown students share members. I will give you one guess who is suffering the most from crippling student debt.
According to a study published in 2019 by Demos, twelve years post-college, white men had paid off 44% of their student loan balance while white women had paid off 28%.
But black women?
Within the same 12-year timeframe they saw their loan balances actually increasing by 13% on average due to the interest compounding on their debt. For black men, their balances grew by 11% on average.
While many black women go on to successfully graduate and step into corporate America, they're confronted with a new challenge once they do; a gender wage gap that is much wider than average for people of color.
When it comes to wages, black women are paid 61 cents for every dollar earned by their white male counterparts. It may seem small but over a 40-year window, this results in black women earning about $946,000 less.
That is from an article entitled The Impact of the Student Debt Crisis on Black Women that draws heavily from the brilliant research at Demos linked to in this passage.
In summary the student debt crisis is a result of sexism and racism and unfairly and disproportionately penalizes Black Women. These women were sold a lie. A university degree barely budges their net worth. White men with only high school degrees continue to out perform them over their earning careers. Meanwhile white men continue to reap the vast majority of the financial benefits of higher education while incurring far less debt.
I say level the fucking playing field for a change. Let’s cancel all student debt starting with that of Black Women. Join me in kicking misogynoir in the balls.
Now you may have noticed that I have mentioned the military paying for my education several times. I paid for my education in the jungles of Rwanda looking for mass graves, finding them, and processing them. While I was there I delivered numerous babies to women who were the victims of horrific gang rapes. Their husbands were in those mass graves.
So to all the people arguing that you suffered and struggled to pay off your student loans and so should everyone else let me say this. You know fuck all about struggling and suffering. If you did you’d join me and offer American women of color who are truly suffering because of student debt a hand up.