I’ve been making the case for a couple of years now that if you’re looking for a real example of social injustice, take a look at the United States higher education system. For years liberals and progressives argued that everyone deserves a college education, that government should help anyone with a high school degree attend college, and that poor students could borrow huge sums to pay for ever-escalating tuition and fees without ill consequence. Now even the social justice warriors are waking up to the social disaster they have wrought.
Readers of Bacon’s Rebellion know full well that the policy of indiscriminately handing out student loans to everyone has created a new class of debt slaves. Not all high school graduates are academically prepared for college-level work. Not everyone who undertakes to earn a college degree is financially able to complete their degrees, even with financial assistance. As a result, literally millions of Americans have taken on college debt without earning the degree or other workforce credential that would allow them to obtain a job that pays enough to carry that debt.
The members of the new debtor class are disproportionately poor, and they are disproportionately African-American. This is a real social injustice, not an imagined one, and it has arisen from the blind pursuit of good intentions.
Finally, progressives are waking up. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, data from a U.S. Department of Education study provides a “first-ever look at long-term outcomes for student loan borrowers, including results by race and ethnicity.”
The data show that 12 years after entering college, the typical African American student who started in the 2003-04 school year and took on debt for their undergraduate education owed more on their federal student loans than they originally borrowed. This holds true even for students who finished a bachelor’s degree at a public institution. One reason they might not be paying down their loans? Nearly half of African American borrowers defaulted, including 75 percent of those who dropped out of for-profit colleges.
Among the detailed findings:
- African-Americans borrow more on average than their peers.
- The typical African-American made no progress over 12 years in paying down his or her loan. African American borrowers who started college in 1995-96 owed 101% of their loans a dozen years later, compared to 60% for whites and 72% for Hispanics.
- A bachelor’s degree does not insulate African-American borrowers from bad outcomes. College drop-outs are not the only ones who default; college grads do, too.
- Nearly half of all African-Americans defaulted on their student loans. One reason, suggests the analysis, is that African-Americans take on higher debt on average.
- Seventy-five percent of African-American dropouts from for-profit colleges defaulted. (No word on how this compares to the percentage of African-American dropouts from public colleges or Historically Black Colleges and Universities.)
A conservative/libertarian reaction to this data is that the system hands out student loans too indiscriminately. Many Americans — of whatever race — would be better off learning a trade in a two-year college than attending a four-year college. Some would be better off not going to college at all and learning on the job. Student loans, like any other kind of loan, should be granted based upon a person’s ability to repay the loan.
The problem is that granting educational loans on the basis of a student’s ability to repay — based upon key predictors like academic preparedness and household resources — would “discriminate” against the poor and, because African-Americans are disproportionately poor, against African-Americans. In today’s political climate, that’s a non-starter.
The Center for American Progress expresses an admirable sentiment when it suggests that policymakers should strive to create a world where African American students don’t start their careers with large loan debts they struggle to repay. But the CAP’s answer is to admit more poor African-Americans into better institutions with more resources to help them succeed. How? By “fixing” admissions practices and funding systems “so that African American students do not end up disproportionately underrepresented at institutions with the greatest resources to educate them.”
Translation: Get higher-ed institutions to admit more African-Americans in the blind hope that somehow they will do better regardless of whether they are academically prepared. Great idea. That’ll work out well.
For Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Koreans and other Americans, the typical family’s climb from poverty into affluence took place over generations. Parents sacrificed so their children could rise a step higher on the educational and socioeconomic ladder. Today’s social justice warriors are impatient. They want African-Americans to vault from Mosby Court to the University of Virginia and a job in the hedge-fund industry in a single generation. A handful of individuals are so extraordinary that they can succeed. Most aren’t. Instead of reaching for achievable goals for self improvement, millions are pursuing unrealistic dreams and winding up in debt bondage as a result.