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President Joe Biden has now announced his long-awaited loan forgiveness plan.
In one of his campaign pledges, Biden and his team laid out a plan that would forgive $10,000 for individuals earning less than $125,000 ($250,000 for families), or $20,000 for Pell recipients, individuals who often came from families earning less than $40,000.
A number of responses erupted. Many applauded the move; despite the fact that it wasn’t exactly the most appealing level (some were seeking as much as $$50,000), they thought it was a great deal. Many on the left felt that it was effectively no longer enough. NAACP President Derrick Johnson saw it as an opportunity for racial and economic justice and wished for a bolder move, but ultimately saw it as a big—and optimistic—first step.
As expected, many conservatives criticized the move. Some questioned how it would affect the deficit. They were quick to note that the move no longer effectively erased the deficit cuts agreed upon by the administration, but rather likely introduced them. Others suggested that it would exacerbate inflation, which remains very high.
But the number one complaint by those who hated this ruling?
It's not fair anymore.
Louisiana Senator John Kennedy summed it up: “Americans who have already paid off their debt, worked their way through school, gone to college abroad, or opted out of college will be paying off loans that other people have taken out. On what planet is that fair?”
But fairness, or the lack thereof, is why so many people took out loans to go to college, especially African Americans.
It is unreasonable that the GI Bill, which provided white Americans with tuition, affordable home loans, and unemployment insurance, should be systematically implemented in a way that excludes black soldiers who fought in the same struggle, faced the same dangers, and suffered the same injuries. Indeed, most black veterans needed to attend historically black colleges and universities, since many institutions at the time barred black enrollment.
It’s unfair that these identical HBCUs have been funded unequally, a convention that has persisted for more than 50 years. For example, between 1957 and 2007, Tennessee’s state college did not receive its state funding match, costing the institution an estimated half-million dollars. More recently, a Forbes study found that between 1987 and 2020, 18 land-grant HBCUs were underfunded by $12.8 billion, adjusted for inflation. Louisiana alone underfunded the southern university by nearly $1.4 billion (I certainly didn’t find the senator’s lament about this unfair). Deliberate underfunding then led to greater reliance on tuition and fees, which in turn increased the amount of loans taken out by families.
HBCU college students are more likely to borrow because homeownership is probably one of the easiest ways for black families to build wealth. It is unreasonable that black families face housing discrimination in a variety of ways. Today, a black professor at Johns Hopkins who studies redlining and racism in the housing market experienced his analysis firsthand. Eager to refinance after a string of improvements, he and his wife had their home appraised for $472,000, now not much higher than the normal purchase rate, and were denied a personal loan. The student verified his analysis by applying for an additional refinance loan, this time eliminating all the single-family homeownership indicators and getting a white professor to take his place. The result? A new appraisal of $750,000, a fifty-nine percent increase in value.
Black families are often denied mortgages and affected by redlining. This is also not fair.
Finally, the majority of black students on the faculty are girls. It is unreasonable for black women to work for 19 months to earn the same amount that their white male counterparts earn in a year. When black women earn sixty-three cents for every dollar that white men earn, it becomes difficult to meet simple needs, let alone maintain and pay for college.
For Black Americans, this has long been unreasonable, and this lack of equity has created a situation where many, trying to advance their careers and pursue the American dream, take on burdensome loans. If America had been reasonable to Black veterans, HBCUs, Black homeowners, and Black girls, we would not have loan forgiveness.
Hopefully, we will avoid putting black American citizens in this position sooner or later. We just deserve to be fair.
Walter Kimbrough is the former president of Dillard's. He is currently the director of the government's Institute for Research on Black Men at Morehouse School.
