"The ability to pay off your loans has everything to do with wages and the ability to gain secure employment, it has everything to do with housing affordability, it has everything to do with child-care costs."

"Every qualified student—regardless of their color, gender, or financial situation—should be able to pursue their educational dreams."

”For far too long, Black voters in this country have been marginalized, misrepresented, and taken for granted in electoral politics."

Tired of politicians talking at, about, but never to, black people, a bevy of organizations joined to conduct the largest survey of black people in the United States since Reconstruction, entitled More Black than Blue: Politics + Power in the 2019 Black Census.

A debt-free plan “changes the target."

"State governments have disinvested from public colleges and universities for a few decades now, and we need to reverse those trends."

“Your income or your family’s wealth is extremely predictive of whether you’re going to go college at all and certainly what program you’re going to do."

With the country’s total student loan debt amounting to about $1.5 trillion , borrowers lose an average of $208,000 in lifetime wealth accumulation that could have come from retirement savings, investments or home purchases, according to studies from Washington, D.C.-based think tank Demos.

“If you compare this to some of the other gifts given in higher education, it’s incredibly stark, and I would hope points us to a smarter, better model of philanthropy where people’s lives are genuinely being transformed.”

“The gauntlet has been laid. It also reminds us that public policy really does have a role to play. We should take a hard look at why this was needed in the first place.”