It’s not quite that simple. Black Americans have more debt when they graduate. It’s not just that they aren’t repaying.
African Americans are more likely to be low-income than whites, and so they likely have fewer family resources to attend college. They also have lower test scores on average, and are therefore less likely to be eligible for scholarships that will cover significant amounts of their costs and tend to get into schools that do not have good financial aid. They also take longer to graduate, on average, because of family disruption and financial issues. These factors combine to mean they have to borrow more. Then they are more likely to fall behind on their loans because they have bigger debt to begin with, and bigger monthly payments. They also, on average, make less money than white college grads. Higher payments, lower salary.
It is a complex issue, though, because there is an element of personal responsibility here. We’re adults, and you can read the promissory note and do a loan calculator these days that tells you how much you’ll have to repay each month after graduating. I did this before college and had firm ideas about how much I would borrow.
But I’ve seen it happen first hand: financial aid officers and other family members convince students (especially if they are first-generation) that the debt is “worth it.” They breezily tell them that they’ll easily be able to repay it once they graduate from college and get a fabulous job. So some 18-year-old students - white and black of course, but particularly in first-generation black families - borrow enormous amounts of money. College education often has a mystical air in working-to-middle-class black families, especially black families where no one has been to college before. My parents thought I’d pretty much snap my fingers and land a job post-college, because they’d never been themselves. (I’m a black American myself, from a working-class family.)
Also, re-read what the policy analyst from Demos said:
The new findings add to a growing body of evidence that that higher education might not be the great equalizer. “There is this popular notion that student debt is good,” said Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at public policy organization Demos. “But it’s actually fostering inequality rather than mitigating it.”
He is, in fact, correct: a lot of people do believe that student loan debt is “good debt,” like a mortgage. In other words, it’s debt that 1) supports a good purpose, aka something you should be borrowing money for, and 2) doesn’t look as bad on your credit report as, say, credit card debt or an auto loan. But then he comments that in this case student loan debt may give some black Americans the chance to go to college but really shackles them to something that decreases their disposable income and net worth.