FORUM
Action T H E C H R ON I C LE
MARCH
8, 2018
A9
Florida victims need thoughts, prayers and America needs School shootings in the United States of America have made me numb almost with a sense of hopelessness. Recently, this country has been reduced to the wild Guest Columnist west because of these senseless acts of violence. Just a few weeks ago in Florida, mothers lost daughters, fathers lost sons and siblings lost each other. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14 was a sad day in American history. The shooter was 19-year- old Nikolas Jacob Cruz, who walked in and killed 17 people with a gun that he purchased. Samantha Fuentes, a senior student at the high school, will not be returning to complete her senior year. She will instead take online courses to graduate. She said, “I want to live out the rest of my high school career normally. But there’s no such thing as normal anymore.” So, it seems that the word normal is no longer a part of the lexicon of some young people these days. These school shootings all have one thing in common and that is the purchase of firearms without much difficul-
James B. Ewers Jr.
ty. At some point, which I hope is sooner rather than later, we must make it tougher to purchase a gun. Right now, it is too easy. Will there be more stringent gun laws implemented? It depends upon whom you ask. It appears this latest shooting may have swayed the thinking of some previously not swayed. Legislators have pretty much given an array of answers to this problem. I believe over time constituents will push them to be more definitive. One of the biggest difference-makers in this gun issue is the students themselves. They are marching for stricter gun control measures. Some on the pro-gun side say the students are being persuaded to march and to protest. America’s high school students who are leading this movement are both reasonable and deeply concerned about what is happening in America today with guns. Another common theme in America’s violent present is the phrase, “We are sending our thoughts and prayers.” All of us are sending our thoughts and prayers. This expression has been a common thread in our society whenever our universal brothers and sisters meet with tragedy and sadness. And yes, we must continue to send our thoughts and prayers to the families in Florida. Yet in the minds of many these mass shootings are
happening way too often. It is time for something to be done, in my opinion, by elected officials. Everyday citizens like you and me read the reports and listen to the news and come away with the fact it is too easy to purchase a gun here. If you are a lawmaker with children, you send them to school and make the assumption they’ll be safe. This is the same assumption the parents in Connecticut and Florida made. You must do something now as the hour is getting later each day. People with bad intentions are trying to destroy this country. Stevie Wonder penned a tune some years back and here are some of the lyrics: “It’s that love’s in need of love today. Don’t delay send yours in right away. Hate’s goin’ round breaking many hearts. Stop it please before it’s gone too far.”
James B. Ewers Jr. Ed.D. is a former tennis champion at Atkins High School in Winston-Salem and played college tennis at Johnson C. Smith University, where he was all-conference for four years. He is a retired college administrator. He can be reached at ewers.jr56@yahoo.com.
The student loan debt crisis is a civil rights issue
From attacks on voting rights to police killings of unarmed civilians and Wade growing Henderson inequities in earnings and wealth, the Guest Columnist 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 AfricanAmericans and other communities of color. More than 50 years ago, Congress passed 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 OK 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 percent to 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. AfricanAmerican students tend to take out more
Illustration by Ron Rogers for the Chronicle
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, AfricanAmerican 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 highsalary 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 lowincome 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.
Don't put off preparing for the worst Jennifer Stuart
Guest Columnist
What are advance directives? Advance directives are legal documents that state your wishes about your medical care, finances and property in case you become incapacitated or die. Here are the most common types: *Will: States who receives your property at death (your "beneficiaries") and who handles your affairs after you die (your "executor"). *Living
will:
Describes when you would want certain medical care withheld if you are unable to speak for yourself. *Durable power of attorney: States who can handle your financial matters and make related decisions on your behalf if you are unable to do so. This remains in effect only while you are alive.
*Health care power of attorney: Allows another person to make medical decisions for you if you are unable to make those decisions yourself. When I prepare wills and other advance directives for clients, they often mention how long they have been putting off this task. Even as an attorney, I long procrastinated on preparing these documents
for myself. It's nobody's idea of a fun way to spend an afternoon. But one excuse that people often use to avoid this task needs to be addressed because it's based on a faulty assumption. People often tell me they'd rather just wait to prepare advance directives, like powers of attorney for financial matters and health care decisions, when there's really a need for those documents. Here's the problem with that excuse: Such triggering events could be exactly when it becomes too late to sign advance directives. What many people don't realize about advance directives is that they can only be authorized at a time when you have the legal capacity to make decisions and appoint others to handle
things for you. Once you lose the mental or physical ability to make and communicate decisions, you also lose the ability to create valid, enforceable powers of attorney. This also applies to a living will, a document that let doctors know under which circumstances you would want life-prolonging measures withheld. Once you no longer have the capacity to make decisions about what you want, including which individuals you would allow to make decisions for you, you cannot legally execute these documents and they will not be valid even if you sign them. To understand the importance of having advance directives in place before a triggering event, consider what can happen without them. If you become physically or men-
tally incapacitated and have not authorized anyone else to make decisions for you, doctors will look to your next of kin to make health care decisions. This may be fine for some, but it could be a nightmare if you're separated but not yet divorced, or if you are estranged from your closest relative. As far as finances go, if nobody has authority to write checks for you and pay your bills, you may rack up debt. The only remedy available will likely be legal guardianship. This means you must be declared incompetent and it will be too late then to choose who you wish to act as your legal guardian. If you are no longer competent, absolutely anyone can file a petition to become your guardian and it will be up to a clerk of
court, who has never met you before, to decide whether to grant any particular individual the power to make major decisions about your life. Advance directives were invented to avoid those drastic outcomes. Preparing them while you're mentally and physically able to do so gives you maximum options. So if you're aging, but happily still able to make decisions and do things for yourself, use that power now to extend your decisions into the future while you still can.
Jennifer Stuart is an attorney in Raleigh with Legal Aid of North Carolina's Senior Law Project (SLP). The SLP provides free civil legal help to North Carolinians who are 60 or older. To contact the SLP, call 1877-579-7562 (toll-free), Monday through Friday, 911 a.m. and 1-3 p.m.