'Big Beautiful Bill' Is An Attack On Black Education

Attacking Black education is an unbroken American tradition.

During slavery, it was illegal for Black people to read and write. Then, during Jim Crow segregation, Black schools were starved of funding and resources to keep us uneducated, subservient, and cheap to exploit. After Brown v. Board, America fought desegregation with “school choice” and white flight to keep our schools separate and unequal. 

Fast-forward to the Bush years, and we got No Child Left Behind, a high-stakes testing scam that penalized Black and brown schools for being under-resourced while threatening them with closure. Then Obama’s Race to the Top incentivized teacher firings, charter schools, and test prep factories instead of actual investment. And let’s not forget the explosion of charter schools themselves—privatizing education while gutting public systems that Black families rely on.

Then America came for affirmative action, stripping away one of the few tools meant to open doors to higher education for us. 

And if you’ve managed to survive all that and still claw your way into college, that’s when they really tighten the noose. They’ll gladly hand you a degree so long as you sign away your future and bind yourself to a lifetime of endless debt. Because debt is one of America’s oldest weapons of social control. And Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is nothing but sharecropping for student loans.  They no longer need to chain your body to a field; they just chain your paycheck to a monthly bill you’ll never finish paying off before you kick the bucket.

Just as Black enrollment in college and graduate programs more than doubled over the past few decades, tuition costs skyrocketed, and the student loan system exploded, turning higher education from a promise of mobility into a machine for generational debt.  In 1976, Black students made up about 9% of undergraduates in the U.S.  By the mid-2010s, that share had climbed to around 14–15%, with raw numbers rising from roughly 900,000 to over 2 million.

Graduate enrollment tells a similar story. Between the 1980s and 2010s, the number of Black students pursuing advanced degrees more than doubled as well. Even with slight declines in the late 2010s, the long arc is undeniable: more Black students were getting in the door.

But at the very moment our access was expanding, those doors got dramatically more expensive to walk through. Inflation-adjusted tuition at public four-year colleges tripled between 1980 and 2020, from about $2,000 to over $7,000 per year in 2020 dollars.  Private nonprofit four-year tuition roughly doubled in that same window, surging from around $11,000 to over $28,000 annually. Even community colleges, often marketed as “affordable,” saw real costs rise.

To bridge that gap, students borrowed heavily. The federal student loan portfolio ballooned from under $250 billion in the early 2000s to over $1.7 trillion by the early 2020s. Policy changes like expanding Parent PLUS and Grad PLUS loans specifically pushed borrowing for families and graduate students, hitting Black borrowers especially hard. A 2016 Brookings study found Black graduates owed, on average, $7,400 more than white peers at graduation, and held 11–13% more debt even 12 years later.

In other words, just as Black students finally started to enter higher education in greater numbers, the system shifted to make sure that access came with a lifetime price tag. We were told we could get our degrees, but we’d have to pay tribute for the privilege for decades to come. It’s the old plantation logic dressed up in tuition bills and promissory notes: work the land, pay the master most of what you earn, and be grateful for the chance.

And let’s not ignore what was happening inside those institutions at the same time. This shift also coincided with the rise of the low-paid adjunct instructor workforce, now the majority of college faculty. Most of them are white women, mirroring the racial and gender makeup of the K–12 teaching force. Why does this matter for Black education? Because even as our enrollment surged, we were more likely to be taught by instructors underpaid, overworked, and with little institutional power or investment in us. It reproduced the same old dynamic: Black students funneled into under-resourced classrooms while paying ever-higher prices for the privilege.

At the same time that more Black, Latinx, and other historically excluded students were fighting their way in, often the first in their families to attend college, white undergraduate and graduate enrollments flattened or declined.  And so colleges needed new paying customers.  But instead of truly opening the doors with investment, states cut funding. Schools jacked up tuition. The federal government expanded loans.

In other words, they didn’t mind letting us in, but they refused to pay for us to succeed. They shifted the cost burden onto us precisely as our numbers grew. That’s not an accident. It’s a business model. So when I call this a modern form of sharecropping, I’m saying that the system adapted to extract as much as possible from new Black and brown students, knowing full well that structural racism would make repayment harder.

Meanwhile, state legislatures were busy gutting public universities, slashing funding, attacking humanities disciplines, and treating education as mere job training. As states disinvested, they hired cheaper, overworked instructors, and they cut programs. They made school worse and more expensive at the same time. And who bore the brunt? The same students who’d finally broken through decades of legal barriers, segregation, and underfunded K–12 systems to even get there.

Too many students emerged with expensive, narrow, or even worthless degrees that employers didn’t respect. Combined with crushing debt, this is a formula for permanent precarity. We get told to chase education as the ticket out, only to discover the ticket is invalid and the debt is forever. It’s not opportunity, it’s entrapment.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is just the latest hustle to keep us in economic bondage. It tears up the current income-driven repayment plans, like SAVE and PAYE, that many Black borrowers rely on. Those plans cap payments as a share of income and offer forgiveness after 20–25 years. Under Trump’s bill, borrowers get two stripped-down options, one with forgiveness only after 30 years, the other just a standard plan stretched out to 25. He’s scrapping deferment for hardship and unemployment. If you can’t pay, then too bad. Interest piles up. Default explodes. Garnishments come for your wages, your tax refund, and your Social Security.

That matters because Black borrowers already owe more than their white peers on average, both at graduation and years later. We’re also more likely to have used federal PLUS loans, Parent and Grad, which Trump’s plan caps or eliminates. Many of us turn to these loans because our families have less generational wealth to draw on. His plan means pushing us out of federal protections and into private lenders who charge more and forgive nothing.

They know exactly what they’re doing. This isn’t just about individual debt; it’s about engineering collective immobility via our educational and economic aspirations.  It’s about ensuring that Black people remain a labor pool with fewer choices. When your credit is ruined, you can’t buy a house. When your wages are garnished, you can’t save or invest. When your degree is shackled to debt you can’t pay off, it’s not freedom, it’s another contract with the plantation.

Debt is social control. It tells you where you can live, what jobs you can take, and what risks you can afford. And for Black borrowers, the risk of default is higher because of structural racism in hiring, wages, and wealth. Even with the same credit profiles, Black borrowers are more likely to face debt-collection judgments. This bill is a gift to that industry.

So when they say this is about “simplifying repayment,” know the truth. It’s about extracting wealth from Black graduates and their families for another generation. About keeping us just solvent enough to work, but too indebted to build real power or stability. It’s sharecropping by another name.

They criminalized our literacy once. They segregated our schools. They privatized them. Now they want to trap us in lifelong debt for daring to get the education they once tried to deny us entirely. This bill ain’t “beautiful.” It’s America doing what it’s always done to make sure Black freedom comes at a price we can never quite pay off.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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