Unpaid student loan debt in America has become a major national problem. Last year it stood at a staggering 1.5 trillion dollars owed! Students are enrolling with the idea that the education will give them a better life, but instead, end up graduating with debts so high they’ve pretty much just buried themselves into a deep hole. Normally, they end up having to take any job they can get upon graduating just to be able to start paying off their loan, which they will have to be paying off for decades to come.
But this year, one very lucky class had all their debt taken care of by an angel. The class came from Morehouse an all-male Historically Black College. The angel was billionaire investor and philanthropist Robert F. Smith who pledged to pay off the student loan debt of all the Morehouse 2019 graduates. Smith made the surprise announcement while delivering the commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr. He told them all that his family would wipe out the student debt of the entire class of 2019.
Smith said:
“On behalf of the eight generations of my family that have been in this country, we’re gonna put a little fuel in your bus. This is my class, 2019. And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans. I know my class will pay this forward.”
One of the lucky students was Aaron Mitchom, a 22-year-old finance major. He told the Associated Press about how he had drawn up a spreadsheet to calculate how long it would take him to pay back $200,000 in student loans. It came to 25 years at half his monthly salary, he said. In an instant, that number vanished. Mitchom wept.
“I can delete that spreadsheet,” he said. “I don’t have to live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was shocked. My heart dropped. We all cried. In the moment it was like a burden had been taken off.” His mother, Tina Mitchom, included. She explained how eight family members, including Mitchom’s 76-year-old grandmother, took turns over four years co-signing on the loans that got their student across the finish line.
Mitchom was just one of nearly 400 graduating seniors who were overjoyed and brought to tears of happiness from Smith’s kindness. The pledge to eliminate student debt for the 2019 class was estimated at $40 million, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “If I could do a backflip, I would. I am deeply ecstatic,” Elijah Dormeus, a business administration major from Harlem in New York City who has $90,000 in student loan debt, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Morehouse President David A Thomas acknowledges that Smith’s gift will have a profound effect on each and every student’s life. He said:
“Many of my students are interested in going into teaching, for example, but leave with an amount of student debt that makes that untenable. In some ways, it was a liberation gift for these young men that just opened up their choices. We appreciate his generosity and his investment in a generation of students who will follow in his footsteps as global leaders and entrepreneurs.”
To conclude, Smith spoke these deeply profound and inspirational words… He told the graduates during his commencement address:
“You great Morehouse men are bound only by the limits of your own conviction and creativity.”
