Viewpoint Michigan Chronicle
A Real Times Media Newspaper
(Founding Board Member, Center for Responsible Lending)
From attacks on voting rights to police killings of unarmed civilians and growing inequities in earnings and wealth, the civil rights gains of the past six decades are facing threat after threat. But one front in the fight for full equality—meaningful access to higher education—is particularly urgent. With 65 percent of jobs soon requiring more than a high school diploma, the need is greater than ever, especially for African Americans and other communities of color. ore than 50 years ago, Congress passed Wade Henderson the Higher Education Act (HEA), intending to open the doors to higher education by providing students with financial assistance and low-interest loans. Conventional wisdom has traditionally held two things: 1) Higher education is the great equalizer; 2) It is okay to take out debt for the tickets to upward mobility: a college education and a home mortgage. These life decisions—and the struggles and sacrifices that made them possible—helped to build and grow the Black middle class. Now, aspirations for advancement are colliding with the discriminatory legacy of the financial crisis. Our country’s student loan bill has skyrocketed. Student debt is now the second-largest source of household debt after housing. Forty-four million Americans have $1.4 trillion in student loan debt. One reason: Since the 1990s, the average tuition and fees at our universities have jumped an average of 157–237 percent depending on the type of institution. As with the Great Recession, people of color, poor people, and predatory institutions are at the center of this socioeconomic catastrophe. They must also be at the center of the solutions. We must face up to the fact that students of color are more likely to borrow for their education and, unfortunately, to default on these loans. Even Black college graduates default on their loans at almost four times the rate of their White counterparts and are more likely to default than even White dropouts. This increased risk of defaulting on student loans is the direct result of inequities in financial resources, as well as discrimination in hiring, salaries and, all too often, social capital. In 2013, the median White family had 13 times more wealth than the median black family and 10 times more wealth than the
median Latino family. African American students tend to take out more debt than their White counterparts, and both Blacks and Latinos are more likely to default than Whites. Since Blacks with bachelor’s degrees earn only 79 percent and Latinos only 83 percent of what their White counterparts earn, African American and Hispanic students have a harder time repaying their loans. Further contributing to the crisis, Blacks and Latinos comprise 41 percent of the students at the high-cost, low-quality, for-profit colleges. These institutions frequently fail to prepare students for high-salary jobs, instead saddling them with exorbitant debts that they can’t repay. How then can we address these challenges? Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants to ease regulations on the loan servicers and for-profit colleges that have gotten us into this mess. U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) of the House Education and Workforce Committee would take this effort even further. Her proposal for reauthorizing the HEA, the “PROSPER Act,” would ensure that students will have to borrow more to get a postsecondary education with the very real likelihood that they will never pay off the debt. This would all but guarantee that predatory, for-profit programs would continue to rise exponentially right alongside our national student debt bill. Efforts to make student aid more costly for students rather than hold institutions accountable for what they do with the aid reflects either a catastrophic misunderstanding of the root causes of this issue or something more disturbing: the blatant effort to recreate the system we had before the HEA was enacted. In this system, traditional college was by and large only accessible to the wealthy, who were usually White. Fixing our broken student debt system should not mean un-doing years of progress since the HEA or saddling marginalized groups with a lifetime of debt. Instead, we need to hold student loan servicers, debt collectors, and institutions of all kinds accountable for their practices. African Americans, Latinos and low-income students from all backgrounds need more income-based grants, loans, financial assistance, and admissions policies that tear down barriers of color, culture, and class, not support them. Helping college graduates to repay their loans isn’t the only challenge. The challenge is enabling and empowering all our young people to make their fullest contribution to our country. This is, in the last analysis, a debt that all Americans owe to ourselves and our nation’s future. Wade Henderson is a founding board member of the Center for Responsible Lending. You can follow Wade on Twitter @Wade4Justice.
Fair Housing Act:
A Milestone on the Journey to Equality By Jeffrey W. Hicks A half-century ago, the Fair Housing AcA half-century ago, the Fair Housing Act was enacted to prohibit discrimination in housing based on race, color, creed and national origin. The law also supported NAREB’s efforts toincrease Black homeownership which we believe serves to increase wealth and other economic outcomes for Black Americans. We have since experienced highs and lows in the journey towards economic empowerment and Black homeownership. While sometimes challenged, we are not discouraged. And, we have learned vital lessons along the Jeffrey W. Hicks way. The National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) has advocated for Black Americans to own their homes since 1947, and we are proud to play a leadership role in that struggle. But this is not a solitary endeavor. We must grow a “Community of Concern” by partnering and actively involving civil and human rights organizations, community-based and social service organizations, business groups, and the faithbased community-our oldest and most trusted institution. We must collaborate to create strong, viable communities that help to stabilize Black Americans and their families through homeownership. In 1970, two years after the passage of The Fair Housing Act, Black homeownership was 41.6 percent. It reached its height in 2004 at 49 percent. Today, Black homeownership stands at 42.1 percent, almost the same as nearly 50 years ago. The economic downturn of a decade ago hurt many Black homeowners with high foreclosures, upside-down
HIRAM E. JACKSON Publisher ■ CATHY NEDD Associate Publisher ROZ EDWARD Managing Editor SAMUEL LOGAN Publisher 1933-2011
mortgages, and financial upheaval from which many are still struggling to recover. Today, economic segregation remains a problem. Urban centers, long the home of Black Americans, are being gentrified. Many with deep community roots are being forced out by rising taxes and skyrocketing housing values. While obvious obstacles like Jim Crow segregation no longer exist, we still face formidable obstacles to owning homes. Obstacles like credit scoring, which is based not on how diligently we pay our bills, but on how much consumer debt we can amass. Obstacles like crippling student debt, which impacts Black Americans deeply. Obstacles like unfair mortgage lending practices. Despite these challenges, we know that wealth can be built through education, through financial literacy, through creating and growing our Community of Concern to support homeownership. This is how Black America educates its children and how we set up businesses-by using equity from our homes to invest in ourselves, our families and our futures. We stand on the shoulders of NAREB founders and visionaries like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who spoke to NAREB in 1967 about the need for “middle-class Negroes to ... publicly identify with the problem of poverty which engulfs the life of the masses.” NAREB’s motto is “Democracy in Housing,” and we will continue to fight for that. We must continue to be vigilant. We must continue to EDUCATE Black Americans, to ENCOURAGE Black Americans, and do everything we can to EMPOWER Black Americans to build wealth, to build stability, and to invest in our futures through that most fundamental part of the American Dream: homeownership. Jeffrey W. Hicks is the 30th president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers.
JOHN H. SENGSTACKE Chairman-Emeritus 1912-1997
LONGWORTH M. QUINN Publisher-Emeritus 1909-1989
CONTACT US 1452 Randolph • Detroit, MI 48226 • (313) 963-8100 e-mail: newsdesk@michronicle.com
April 18-24, 2018 | Page A-4
The Student Loan Debt Crisis is a Civil Rights Issue By Wade Henderson
Quote of the Week
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The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes.
”
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Nigerian novelist
President Trump’s FY 2019 Budget Hurts Low-Income, Black and Brown Communities By Cedric L. Richmond Congressman, Chairman, Congressional Black Caucus
If you want to know how a president feels about your community, then all you need to do is look at his or her budget, because it reflects their values—both what they value and what they don’t. If you look at President Trump’s FY 2019 budget, it’s clear that he doesn’t value low-income and black and brown communities because he cuts programs that these communities disproportionately rely on, including the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (food stamp program), Medicaid, the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program, and Community Development Block Grants, which provide funding for projects and programs—af ford- Wade Henderson able housing, anti-poverty programs, and infrastructure development—that inner city and rural communities need to survive. One of the most disgusting examples of this is President Trump’s proposal for the food stamp program, a program that serves close to 44 million Americans, 26 percent of which are Black. In addition to proposing to cut the program by $213 billion, which would leave 4 million low-income people without these benefits, President Trump is proposing to prevent families from choosing what type of food they buy for themselves. He wants to send these families Blue Apron-style boxes of perishable and non-perishable food items, including items produced by American farmers. Although the Administration has characterized this proposal as a cost-savings measure that would help low-income communities eat more nutritious foods and American farmers make a profit, it is demeaning and disrespectful, because it’s based on a notion that low-income people can’t and shouldn’t think for themselves. Under this proposal, SNAP beneficiaries wouldn’t be able to decide what they want to eat, including culturally appropriate foods for their family, and they wouldn’t know what foods they were getting, preventing them from planning meals for their family. Additionally,
there
are
logistical
problems with the proposal. Families may not have a car and be unable to pick up the box of food at the designated location in their community. Also, severe weather events may prevent families from getting food on time, leaving them hungry for days or weeks at a time. On top of that, providing an over-abundance of fresh perishable foods to families where parents work two and three jobs and may not have time to cook them, may make a bad situation worse. These concerns and others make it unlikely that this plan will save the federal government $130 billion over 10 years as predicted by the Trump Administration. The food stamp proposal isn’t the only issue with President Trump’s FY 2019 budget. His budget cuts two critically important education programs for low-income students: GEAR UP, a grant program focused on increasing the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education, and Promise Neighborhoods, an Obama-era grant program that provides cradle-tocollege-to-career services for children living in low-income neighborhoods. In addition, his budget cuts a number of programs that help workers, especially workers who belong to unions. His budget cuts Occupational Safety and Health Administration training grants that the agency uses to help employers better enforce workforce health and safety requirements. His budget also targets labor unions, whose membership is 14 percent Black, by investing in more union focused investigations. President Trump’s budget would also insufficiently invest in our nation’s infrastructure, while also cutting grants that fund infrastructure development at the state and local level. President Trump proposes to invest $200 billion in repairing America’s roads and bridges even though there’s trillions of dollars of infrastructure work to be done across the country, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. This insufficient investment will force states to rely too much on the private sector for funding they need to start and finish projects, projects that will likely come with a cost for the very commuters they’re supposed to help: toll roads. President Trump calls his budget “An American Budget,” but the Americans he has in mind aren’t those who are living paycheck to paycheck and aren’t those who are members of Black and brown communities. Congressman Cedric L. Richmond represents the 2nd District of Louisiana, which includes parts of New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Finally – good news for aging services! By Paul Bridgewater This past year, there have been many battles between Administration and Congressional proposals for the country’s 2018 budget. It appeared that we might lose or have reduced funding for everything from home-delivered meals to chronic disease self-management education to the Community Services Block Grant. Any combination of such cuts would be serious blows to Ameri- Paul Bridgewater ca’s oldest residents. I was angry, sad, concerned and determined, all at the same time. I couldn’t imagine the impact of federal cuts on those served by the Detroit Area Agency on Aging. Yet finally, the “omnibus” appropriations bill that the President signed on March 23 is good news for those who rely on aging services programs. It preserves 13 valuable programs that had been slated for cuts or elimination (by either the Administration or Congress), but which were preserved and/or received increases. Here are a few that survived the chopping block: • The national program that funds the Michigan Medicare and Medicaid Assistance Program. Instead, it received a $2 million increase. • The Senior Community Service Em-
ployment Program (SCSEP) was level-funded. • The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program was increased by $250 million to $3.6 billion. An additional 10 Older Americans Act programs were not under threat and received notable increases, although they remain underfunded. These include: • Congregate and Home-Delivered Nutrition Programs • National Family Caregiver Support Program • Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (Visit www.ncoa.org to see a full list of what’s in the bill) So what made the difference? Clearly, it was the persistent, year-long advocacy from the National Council on Aging to mobilize advocates – national groups as well as individual citizens with calls and letters to their Congressional representatives. So what’s next? Congress is now working on FY19 appropriations. YOUR help will be needed throughout the year to continue to educate our members of Congress. The years can creep up on all of us. One day we’re advocating for aging parents, the next we’re advocating for ourselves. We need public policies that protect America’s aging population. More than ever, we must speak up, speak out and speak together. Paul Bridgewater is President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Detroit Area Agency on Aging (DAAA)