On Wednesday afternoon, a panel of academics and advocates gathered to discuss topics in Dr. Jamal Watson’s latest book, The Student Debt Crisis: America’s Moral Urgency. A clear theme of the book is that student debt is a racial and justice issue.
Watson, an award-winning higher education journalist and professor and associate dean at Trinity Washington University, moderated the hour-long conversation.
Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III, an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Post-Secondary Education at the University of Michigan, noted that 86% of overall wealth in the United States is held by white families and 2.9% by Black families. The student debt burden, he added, is also a racialized phenomenon that complicates the wealth gap.
“Even those who have had opportunities to access financial aid or grant packages but come from low-income backgrounds, are often leaving college in a worse financial state than they entered,” said Davis, who added that Black students are taking on student loans at a higher rate than white students. “These students are also more vulnerable in the inability to pay back that loan because they’re going into a racist and sexist labor market,” he added.
Tylik McMillan, an advocate and strategist around student debt issues who is featured in the book, said student loan debt has to be seen as a civil rights issue.
“Young people, especially Black and Brown youth, are told that education is the pathway forward, yet we graduate shackled with debt that locks us out of building wealth and buying homes, or even choosing careers based on our passions instead of survival,” he said. “Progress will stall until we treat it as the issue that it is, and that is a racial equity and liberation issue.”
