Loan forgiveness is just one way to tackle student debt

Student debt was in the limelight recently as candidates for the Democratic nomination for president offered solutions on the debate stage. Candidates also acknowledged the racial disparities in student debt; “African American students borrow more, owe more money and default more frequently than any other racial group on their educational loans,” The Washington Post reports.

The Post notes that politicians are not the only people tackling this issue. Jalil Mustaffa Bishop, a postdoctoral scholar in Penn GSE’s Higher Education Division, proposed solutions for addressing the impacts the debt crisis is having on the African American community. While Bishop is in favor of forgiving student debt, he suggests an additional approach of labor reform, shifting the focus on “getting the good jobs” to “turning the bad jobs good.”

“If we remove the labor conditions that make debt desirable for mobility and necessary for survival, then student loans will become obsolete,” Bishop told the Post. He suggests increasing minimum wage to a living wage and pursuing other labor reforms to tackle the root causes of why people take on student debt in the first place.

Read the full Post piece here.