National

Even Though Blacks Borrow More for College, Enrollment Declines

Published

9 years ago

July 28, 2015

Johnny Taylor, the president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), speaks during the TMCF 26th Annual Awards Gala in Washington, D.C. (Freddie Allen/NNPA News Wire)

By Freddie Allen
Senior Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Recognizing that a college degree is one of the surest paths to a job and economic security, Black families are taking on more student loan debt than White and Hispanic families, according to a new report by Wells Fargo.

According to the report, student loan debt increased by roughly 97 percent between the 1995-1996 school year and 2015 and Black undergraduates that started school during the 2011-2012 school year can expect to borrow $28,400 for a four-year bachelor’s degree compared to Hispanics who will borrow $27,600.

The total price of attendance for Black full-time students increased 115.4 percent during the 2011-2012 school year compared to the 1995-1996 school year and White students experience 113.6 percent jump over the same time period.

The report stated, “The average out-of-pocket net price (which is the price after aid plus student loans) increased 88.7 percent for Blacks, 80.8 percent for Asians and 74.7 percent for Whites between the 2011 and 2012 school year compared to the 1995 and 1996 school year.”

In addition, the report found that more than 60 percent of Black undergraduate students qualify “for some type of aid from the federal government” compared to 50 percent of Hispanics and 34 percent of Whites and Asians.

John Rasmussen, the president of personal lending and the head Education Financial Services at Wells Fargo said that two primary realities often frame the conversation about higher education: student loan debt and the growing costs associated with earning a degree.

“The outstanding amount of student loan debt has now exceeded $1.2 trillion,” said Rasmussen. “That is larger than credit card debt and automobile debt.”

He also noted that the cost of college over the past 20 or 25 years has increased at a pace that is significantly faster than inflation.

“Families are trying to be really practical,” said Rasmussen. “Trying to keep costs down now, staying in state more, exploring community college options, and asking tough questions like, ‘Are my kids ready to go to college?’”

Rasmussen added that students and families want federal loan programs that are easier to navigate, better information about the true costs of federal loans and what families can expect for outcomes like graduation rates, job placement rates and salary and earnings and the repayment performance of students.

Even though Blacks are taking on more student loan debt, in recent years that increased burden has delivered mixed results on enrollment rates.

A 2014 report by the Wells Fargo Securities, LLC Economics Group, that linked educational attainment to economic success, found that Black enrollment in degree-granting institutions has increased considerably since the Great Recession, but that enrollment rate “slowed down noticeably in 2011 and 2012.”

The report said, “This slowdown in Black enrollment in degree-granting institutions plus the strong increase in the enrollment of Hispanics has helped push the Hispanic rate above the Black rate for the first time since the early part of the 1970s.”

Still, economists and education advocates agree that a college education continues to be a sound investment, despite the cost.

“Not only do you have the ability to improve your earning potential over your life, you also are employed over a longer period of time and you’re more likely to keep your job during a recession,” said Eugenio Alemán, a senior economist with Wells Fargo.

The 2014 report cited research that showed that individuals that obtained a bachelor’s degree earned a median income of $50,360, compared to people who finished high school that earned $29,423.

“An associate’s degree leads to a median income of $38,607, more than $9,000 higher than a high school diploma. Those with a graduate degree have a median income of $68,064, 35.2 percent more than those with a bachelor’s degree,’” the 2014 report said.

Even though Blacks 18-24 years old ranked last in enrollment at degree-seeking institutions in 2012 (36.4 percent vs. 42.1 percent of Whites and 37.5 percent of Hispanics), Blacks 18-26 years-old who earned bachelor’s degrees or more, were unemployed just 4.6 percent of weeks from 1998-2011. Blacks (18-26 years-old) who only earned a high school diploma were unemployed nearly three times as long (12.6 percent of weeks) during that time period.

Whites 18-26 years old, who entered the labor market with bachelor’s degree or higher, were unemployed 2.8 percent of weeks between 1998 and 2011, compared to White high school graduates with no college experience who were unemployed 6.8 percent of weeks.

Rasmussen fears that all of the noise in the mainstream media questioning the value of college will have a negative effect on the Black community.

“We need to be really careful on our messaging around the costs, so that kids and families don’t give up hope,” he said. “It takes work and effort and if people view that it’s not worth the effort, then we will have this unintended consequence of underrepresentation of kids of color going to school.

Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., the president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, agreed.

“If the message in high schools is consistently ‘Don’t go to college, because it’s too expensive and you’re going to take on all of this debt and you should just go and get a job,’ America is going to have a real challenge as it browns and grays at once,” said Taylor. “Twenty years from now, when you look around and say, ‘There are no African Americans in leadership roles within industry, within government, within any job that requires a bachelor’s degree,’” it will be because people who criticized the high costs of college talked the Black community out of going to college.”

Taylor continued: “The reality is that college is still a great investment.”

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Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

Published

14 hours ago

December 26, 2024

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To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

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Activism

OPINION: “My Girl,” The Temptations, and Nikki Giovanni

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame. The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.” That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

Published

3 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Nikki Giovanni. Courtesy of Nikki-Giovanni.com

By Emil Guillermo

The Temptations, the harmonizing, singing dancing man-group of your OG youth, were on “The Today Show,” earlier this week.

There were some new members, no David Ruffin. But Otis Williams, 83, was there still crooning and preening, leading the group’s 60th anniversary performance of “My Girl.”

When I first heard “My Girl,” I got it.

I was 9 and had a crush on Julie Satterfield, with the braided ponytails in my catechism class. Unfortunately, she did not become my girl.

But that song was always a special bridge in my life. In college, I was a member of a practically all-White, all-male club that mirrored the demographics at that university. At the parties, the song of choice was “My Girl.”

Which is odd, because the party was 98% men.

The organization is a little better now, with women, people of color and LGBTQ+, but back in the 70s, the Tempts music was the only thing that integrated that club.

POETRY’S “MY GIRL”

The song’s anniversary took me by surprise. But not as much as the death of Nikki Giovanni.

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame.

The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.”

That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

I’ll always see her as the Black female voice that broke through the silence of good enough. In 1968, when cities were burning all across America, Giovanni was the militant female voice of a revolution.

Her “The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” is the historical record of racial anger as literature from the opening lines.

It reads profane and violent, shockingly so then. These days, it may seem tamer than rap music.

But it’s jarring and pulls no punches. It protests Vietnam, and what Black men were asked to do for their country.

“We kill in Viet Nam,” she wrote. “We kill for UN & NATO & SEATO & US.”

Written in 1968, it was a poem that spoke to the militancy and activism of the times. And she explained herself in a follow up, “My Poem.”

“I am 25 years old, Black female poet,” she wrote referring to her earlier controversial poem. “If they kill me. It won’t stop the revolution.”

Giovanni wrote more poetry and children’s books. She taught at Rutgers, then later Virginia Tech where she followed her fellow professor who would become her spouse, Virginia C. Fowler.

Since Giovanni’s death, I’ve read through her poetry, from what made her famous, to her later poems that revealed her humanity and compassion for all of life.

In “Allowables,” she writes of finding a spider on a book, then killing it.

And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened

For Giovanni, her soul was in her poetry, and the revolution was her evolution.

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator, and solo performer. Join him at www.patreon.com/emilamok

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Black History

Book Review: In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World

It’s a tale of heroes: the Maroons, who created communities in unwanted swampland, and welcomed escaped slaves into their midst; Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”; Marème Diarra, who walked more than 2000 miles from Sudan to Senegal with her children to escape slavery; enslaved farmers and horticulturists; and everyday people who still talk about slavery and what the institution left behind.

Published

3 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Book cover. Courtesy of Smithsonian Books.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Ever since you learned how it happened you couldn’t get it out of your mind.

People, packed like pencils in a box, tightly next to each other, one by one by one, tier after tier. They couldn’t sit up, couldn’t roll over or scratch an itch or keep themselves clean on a ship that took them from one terrible thing to another. And in the new book “In Slavery’s Wake,” essays by various contributors, you’ll see what trailed in waves behind those vessels.

You don’t need to be told about the horrors of slavery. You’ve grown up knowing about it, reading about it, thinking about everything that’s happened because of it in the past four hundred years. And so have others: in 2014, a committee made of “key staff from several world museums” gathered to discuss “telling the story of racial slavery and colonialism as a world system…” so that together, they could implement a “ten-year road map to expand… our practices of truth telling…”

Here, the effects of slavery are compared to the waves left by a moving ship, a wake the story of which some have tried over time to diminish.

It’s a tale filled with irony. Says one contributor, early American Colonists held enslaved people but believed that King George had “unjustly enslaved” the colonists.

It’s the story of a British company that crafted shackles and cuffs and that still sells handcuffs “used worldwide by police and militaries” today.

Today, discussions about cooperation and diversity remain essential.

Says one essayist, “… embracing a view of history with a more expansive definition of archives in all their forms must be fostered in all societies.”

Unless you’ve been completely unaware and haven’t been paying attention for the past 150 years, a great deal of what you’ll read inside “In Slavery’s Wake” is information you already knew and images you’ve already seen.

Look again, though, because this comprehensive book isn’t just about America and its history. It’s about slavery, worldwide, yesterday and today.

Casual readers – non-historians especially – will, in fact, be surprised to learn, then, about slavery on other continents, how Africans left their legacies in places far from home, and how the “wake” they left changed the worlds of agriculture, music, and culture. Tales of individual people round out the narrative, in legends that melt into the stories of others and present new heroes, activists, resisters, allies, and tales that are inspirational and thrilling.

This book is sometimes a difficult read and is probably best consumed in small bites that can be considered with great care to appreciate fully. Start “In Slavery’s Wake,” though, and you won’t be able to get it out of your mind.

Edited by Paul Gardullo, Johanna Obenda, and Anthony Bogues, Author: Various Contributors, c.2024, Smithsonian Books, $39.95