REPORT: HBCU Students Pay Higher Loan Rates - YouTube

>> So imagine you wanna go to school, okay, maybe you're a little bit older, you're involved

in your career, and you're looking for the money to do so because school is incredibly

expensive.

Well, you might end up paying a lot for your loans and interest.

And if you're a certain type of person, particularly a non-white person, and you're going to the

school that they have a problem with, you might end up paying even more and not know

that you're paying this extra special discriminatory tax.

So let's talk about an investigation that was done by a group that was looking out for

student borrowers.

So they applied for dozens of loans online.

And in doing so, they concocted this sort of person, an avatar, 24-year-old man who

was going to be the applicant in all of these loans.

He lives in New York.

He doesn't actually, don't look for him, he's made up.

But in this case, he lives in New York, works as a financial analyst and makes $50,000 a

year.

Each time the group applied for a loan, it kept a whole range of factors constant and

they created sort of a professional living in New York.

Has this sort of career that if you don't pay attention to American politics seems to

have some dignity to it, makes a good salary and all of that.

So bear all that in mind, and again, all these factors about his life are held constant as

they applied for loans to go to multiple different schools.

So according to the Civil Rights Council at the nonprofit Student Borrower Protection

Center, the only difference in these cases was where he would go to school.

It applied as if this fictional borrower went to NYU, many other schools, and Howard University,

one of the country's most famous historically black colleges and universities.

And they found that if the otherwise identical hypothetical applicant went to NYU instead

of Howard, there was a big difference.

For a $30,000 personal loan with a five year term, it found an applicant would pay around

$3,500 more in interest and fees if they went to Howard.

Again, the same person with the same job making the same salary, the same everything, only

that rather than going to NYU, they were gonna go to Howard.

They were gonna pay thousands of dollars, a significant jump in their overall interest

payments.

>> And this is part of how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

But in this case, it's not just about class, it is definitely about race.

So that is so depressing.

Now, you could say, well, look, first of all, there's nothing you could say, okay.

But let's say you're trying to make a weird case for, well, look, maybe folks from certain

backgrounds have certain socioeconomic conditions and then they pay back the loans less.

For example, if you have a good credit score, you're more likely to pay the loan back and

if you have bad credit score, etc.

And so the maybe race is an indication of your socioeconomic background, which might

be an indication of your credit score.

But none of that is true in this case, because they have the same income.

Everything is the same.

So the only thing difference is the race of the applicant.

Presumably based on whether they're- >> Presumably, yes.

>> Going to a historically black college or not.

And it's not like we're presuming it.

The people giving the loans presumed it.

>> Yeah.

>> Cuz why give a $3500 difference, right?

>> Exactly, a huge amount of money.

It wasn't the only place that they found this effect.

They also found that if you went to New Mexico State University-Las Cruces, you would also

pay more.

That school has a high percentage of Hispanic students.

So there's discrimination to go around.

And one of the, so your first comment was, this is so depressing, and it is because it's

the sort of thing where there are these groups that are doing great work and investigating

this.

And you can go and you can read the report.

They're an all encompassing report they put together of all the data that they found,

but your hope that something might change.

Right now, I mean, it's like, got somebody call Betsy DeVos so she can get on this thing.

No, it's like it's just another thing added on the mountain of, God, I hope we get to

a sensible place so these sorts of problems can start to be solved.

>> Yeah, and so I saw this great video online.

I wish remembered who did it to give them credit, but they had people line up at the

starting line, and they said, we're gonna do a 100-yard race.

And said, wait, before we do the race, people growing up with two parents, a step forward

or two steps forward, people who grew up in a home rather than an apartment, take a another

step forward, you get it, right?

And whoever wins, by the way, gets like 100 bucks or something along those lines.

And by the time they were done, there were some people who were already at the 70-yard

line.

So then they said, okay, now, we're gonna start the race and the people at the back

were like wait, this isn't fair.

That's life.

So here is minorities who, historically born into households that have 10% of the wealth

of white households because of a history of discrimination.

And then they get layered on top all these different problems.

Redlining in terms of houses, getting pulled over by cops more, body cams on police misidentify

them at 100 times the rate of whites, which leads to more false arrests.

And it goes on and on.

And then, well, they made it, they got a good job, they're gonna go to a good school, okay,

now you gotta pay $3,500 more.

>> Yeah.

>> Right?

>> For the same exact thing.

>> And then people say white privilege, well that's crazy, there's no such thing.

I'm not rich.

No, dude, it isn't about whether you're rich, it's that they got moved way further behind

than you and you didn't even know that.

So when we tell you that, can you please have some empathy?

>> Yeah.

>> And let's all work together to fix it.

>> Yeah, and I just I think, man, you think, even if we could get Trump to sit down and

look at this, that he'd do something about it?

Our only hope is that Bloomberg replaces him.

>> Or maybe Kim Kardashian can pick up the cause, so.

>> That might actually be our only hope.

>> Yeah, so- >> Actually somebody get on that.

>> This is the world we live in now.

All right, we got a year to fix it.