500,000 Black Students Would Benefit from Sanders' College Reforms

A recent paper authored by professors from the New School, Duke University and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, claims that Bernie Sanders' planned education reforms would ease the financial burden on Black students in the U.S.

“A program like Sanders’ would ensure that Blacks are less susceptible to getting caught up in a debt trap,” said Darrick Hamilton, Associate Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at the New School.

Hamilton, who openly supports Sanders, found that the average Black person who holds a bachelor degree would save US$8,334 over the course of his loan thanks to the Vermont senator’s proposed reduction on interest rates.

His colleague and co-author, William Darity Jr., who is the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, said there is a “conceptual issue of what we view as the basic rights of citizenship in the United States.”

“The Sanders position is everyone should have a right to higher education, just as everyone should have the right to decent medical care,” he said.

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Two out of three white college graduates take out loans to finance their studies, according to liberal think tanks. For Black students this number stands at four out of five.

Darity believes this is unfair. “If you view education as something everybody should have, then you want to take the price tag for individual families out of it all together.”

According to the paper, Sanders’ reforms are likely to lead to more Black people attending university, with an additional 331,034 African-Americans likely to graduate with a bachelor's degree. This number increases to half a million if you add associate degrees.

Sanders has continuously expressed the belief that a college education should be free for everyone attending state colleges and universities. His plan would eliminate undergraduate tuition at public institutions and help students at private universities by expanding work-study programs.

Under a Sanders presidency, the U.S. government would also be prohibited to profit off lending to students by implementing smaller interest rates on federal student loans. The plan would be paid for by imposing a tax on Wall Street speculators that would generate about US$300 billion in revenue.

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Ultimately, enabling Black people to earn college degrees increases their average income by US$19,136 a year. The authors claim that Sanders’ plan could achieve a cumulative rise of Black incomes by over US$5 billion among the current population.

“The college tuition plan might not lead to a huge value added in the wealth differences between Blacks and whites, but what it can do is not exacerbate the wealth gap because Blacks are more vulnerable to things like student debt,” Hamilton emphasized.