James Clingman

By the time you read this, millions of college students will have graduated and be looking for jobs. Many will be going on to grad school and millions suddenly will be faced with paying off college loans or contemplating obtaining a loan for graduate studies. Neither option is attractive.

Even if students are fortunate enough to have a job when they graduate, it will be difficult for them to save money when they are making $300 to $600 in monthly payments for college loans.

At more than $1 trillion, college loan debt is an albatross around the necks of students and graduates.

This is indeed a sad state of affairs for our best and brightest. It is said that “millennials” are the first generation that will be worse off than their parents.

What can we do?

High on our agenda should be a demand made to Congress and whoever is running for president for student loan debt forgiveness. A strong, independent bloc of voters must go to candidates in both parties and make this demand. Keep in mind, however, a demand without power backing it up is just rhetoric. We must be willing to withhold our votes in order to get what we want.

The banks and other financial entities got their $780 billion bailout. Where is ours? Why not bail out the students?

The bankers were given billions that they used to make even more money from the taxpayers who paid their bills. Contrary to what we were told, lending was curtailed rather than expanded, and hundreds of thousands of folks are still homeless because there was no real bailout program for them.

As of Jan. 1, 2014, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had paid out $816.3 billion in tax benefits, grants, contracts, loans and entitlements. Who got that money? In my neck of the woods, the folks who got the most were those who worked on the roads and expressways. Of those contractors and workers, few if any were African-American.

Georgia recently embarked on a $1 billion-plus road improvement project, and even with 3.2 million African-Americans in that state, black contractors and workers will not benefit as much as they should. Department of Transportation inclusion rules are based on Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Programs, in which white female businesses get a significant share of the contracts, and “front” companies rule the day.

So with all of the barriers facing our 2015 graduates, and the bleak outlook for improvement of their lot, the least we could do is bail them out.

Politicians said the banks were “too big to fail,” and I guess the bankers were “too big to jail.” They caught a huge break from President George W. Bush and President Obama. It’s time for a break for black and poor people now. Forgive student loans.

Jim Clingman is founder of the Greater Cincinnati African American Chamber of Commerce.