When Elijah Cummings arrived at Howard University as a freshman, all he had was a suitcase and two trash bags full of clothes. "Boy, you've come here to get an education now," Cummings recalls his father telling him. His father was a former sharecropper with a third-grade education. After graduating from college in 1973, Cummings went on to become a lawyer and a U.S. congressman.
The Maryland Democrat returned to Howard last week, bringing Senator Elizabeth Warren, a fellow Democrat, with him to talk about student loans and social mobility. The two lawmakers believe that going to college can help people find high-paying jobs. But they're worried that student debt can make it harder for graduates to achieve financial stability.
Today the majority of all college students—at two-year and four-year, private and public institutions—rely on grants and loans to pay tuition. Americans now hold about $1.2 trillion in student debt, and right now most borrowers aren't paying off their debts at all.
[For more of this story, written by Sophie Quinton, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...n-minorities/392456/]
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