Massachusetts public officials discussed possible solutions to the student loan crisis, including free public college and forgiving loans, during a panel Wednesday evening.
The panelists said graduating in debt was an unavoidable reality.
Andrea Campbell, Boston City Council’s District 4 representative, said despite receiving grants at Princeton University, she had to take out student loans.
“It wasn’t until I went to law school, and I went to UCLA Law School, a public institution, where the debt really racked up,” Campbell said. “At some point, I think I owed over $200,000.”
Campbell said she wishes she had access to more information about the kinds of financial aid resources available.
District 5 City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo said that, like Campbell, he graduated from law school with student debt and owes more than $300,000.
Arroyo said he wants to dispel the myth that people with a lot of debt are financially incompetent.
“I’ve never met more fiscally responsible people than folks who don’t have money,” Arroyo said. “I don’t know anybody who knows how to manage a budget better than people who don’t have money.”
Arroyo said he thought representing lower-income people without other legal resources was worth the sacrifice of taking on debt.
Massachusetts Rep. Nika Elugardo, who serves Boston and Brookline, said she graduated with $26,000 in loans, despite receiving Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s largest scholarship.
“Even when I did the extra work to go out and get scholarships,” Elugardo said. “their very policies kept me from being able to dig out of that debt.”
Elugardo said she almost had to leave MIT because she couldn’t pay tuition, despite working three jobs.
For Massachusetts Rep. Danillo Sena of District 37, the financial challenges he faced as an immigrant studying in the United States prompted him to consider returning to Brazil.
“If you lack immigration status, you don’t qualify for financial aid and really you have no help from the government,” Sena said. “I had to work three jobs to pay for my own education.”
Sena said his experiences led him to advocate for free public education in Massachusetts.
“If we care about public education, we should not be making that a burden to families,” Sena said, “especially when you’re serving the most vulnerable in our society.”
All public education, including college, should be free, Elugardo said, regardless of a person’s age.
Arroyo said lower loan interest rates would not solve the student debt crisis.
“If I can’t pay the principal, why would the loan rate … make any difference?” Arroyo said. “What we actually need is loan relief.”
Arroyo said students of color disportionately experience the cycle of debt because they’re often the first in their families to graduate from college.
America’s capitalist structure, Campbell said, had generated the problem.
“Systems are designed to marginalize, to oppress, and you need a bottom in order to have a capitalist structure,” Campbell said. “If you don’t have that underclass, well, then the system doesn’t work.”
Campbell concluded by calling on listeners to create change by electing people who are willing to recreate the system.
“If we want these structural changes to happen on a short-term basis,” Campbell said, “we elect people who get it and understand it at its core and are willing to do the work and exercise political courage to dismantle those systems and create new systems that work for all of us.”
