Umme Hoque, Organizing Director of The Debt Collective, talks to Nikki about how, after taking on student debt, she became disillusioned with the American Dream. She now works for complete student debt cancelation as well as a radical overhaul of the American education system.

As a first-generation Bengali-American, her parents encouraged her to pursue a higher education so she could land a well-paying job. But she says, “I think student debt has impacted my life in so many ways that I don’t even consciously think about. I’ve had this debt for so long. And it’s just one of those things where I formulate it into everything I do.” Many of her choices, including attending graduate school in the UK, were determined by her growing student debt and the lack of well-paying opportunities in her chosen fields of Journalism and Communications. Since then she has become committed to fighting the wage and wealth gap in America, found especially in BIPOC and immigrant communities.

Listen to hear her story and find out what she thinks it will take for us to win the fight against student debt.

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Transcipt

Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast. It’s so good to have you here. So let’s get into this. How much student debt do you have?

Umme Hoque: I personally have $77,000 worth of debt. And my husband also has about $80,000. So between the two of us, we have a household debt of a little over $150k.

Nikki Nolan: What kind of loans are they? Are they federal? Are they private?

Umme Hoque: My loans are federal debt. They’ve been consolidated with the government, and I actually graduated over 10 years ago from my master’s program. So I started with about $30,000 of debt, which is what the cost of my college was. And so the rest of that is interest. So I owe more in interest than I do in the actual cost of my education.

Nikki Nolan: Which is wild. The interest, it’s just so shocking.
So you’ve been doing a lot of work with The Debt Collective, which is an amazing organization that is organizing student debtors along with other debtors. Tell me a little bit about the work that you’ve been doing recently.

Umme Hoque: Thank you so much for asking. I am working as the organizing director at The Debt Collective, and we are building a new type of union, which is a union of people who either have debt or don’t think that people should have to go into debt to be able to have basic needs like education.

We have been working with this vision for quite a while. And so one of the things that actually happened this week is that we actually saw some outcomes from a campaign that we began many years ago called the Corinthian 15, where a number of folks who were attending Corinthian College, which was a for-profit school, who got screwed over by their school, went on strike and refuse to pay their debts.

And they went through a process called borrower defense to repayment and tried to get their loans canceled through the government. And so although those loans were identified as fraudulent, they were not fully canceled. And we learned that they will have their loans fully canceled and it will actually impact 72,000 people.

So we’ve got over $1 billion of loans that were canceled. And we know that- that shows that student loan debt can be canceled. Like it’s not just some dream that we’ve got. If people take collective action, it’s really possible to, to make this happen.

So we’ve got an upcoming week of action. The last week of March, March 29th through April 4th, where people are going to be taking action online and in their communities, holding events, and protests and stuff like that to really show how important this issue is to so many people. And really call on Joe Biden to do the right thing and cancel all student debt, which is part of our Biden Jubilee 100 campaign.

We’ve got a number of people who are on debt strike right now. I’m one of them refusing to pay our student loan debt until Joe Biden cancels all of it, which is an authority that he has as President. So, hopefully, he’ll be doing that. And if not, we’ll be continuing the pressure, to get him to do it.

Nikki Nolan: Amazing. If someone wanted to get involved in that week of action, what are some ways that people could get involved?

Umme Hoque: They should go to our website debtcollective.org and you can check out our action maps. See if there’s an action near you that you can attend. If you are feeling up for something in person, everything is really COVID safe. Or you can organize your own local event. We’ve got resources and support for you there.

And we also have an online event. On the 31st of March, we’re going to have a virtual call with some of the folks that we have on debt strike who are sharing their stories about why they’re not paying their debt and what it would mean to have debt canceled. And if we move toward tuition-free college, where again, higher education is a public good, as opposed to a penalty that we’re all suffering from. And we’re going to be joined by the Poor People’s Campaign. So it’ll be a really great event talking about all of the aspects of debt and how this is really a moral issue that speaks to the heart of our country and the heart of the values that we share as an entire society.

Nikki Nolan: What is the Poor People’s Campaign?

Umme Hoque: That’s the latest iteration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s campaign, bringing poor people together from across the country to really fight for the needs of people who are struggling right now.

There’s lots of amazing people that are a part of that campaign doing great work. We’re really excited to be working with them to really lift up how this is an issue that’s truly important to everyone in our community.

Nikki Nolan: I feel like that’s a good place to transition to. What has been the impact of student debt on your life?

Umme Hoque: I think student debt has impacted my life in so many ways that I don’t even consciously think about. I’ve had this debt for so long. And it’s just one of those things where I, I formulate it into everything I do.

One of the things that I did do is when I went to grad school, I had to like do the analysis of how much more money can I take out for debt? Cause I still can’t afford it to be able to, to like really achieve these dreams that I have and all that sort of stuff. And I ended up making a decision to go to school overseas in the UK because the math worked out that it was cheaper to take out loans and do a one-year program overseas than it would be to do a program in the US.

So like that was one of those things where I just like, you just have to end up factoring all of these different items and things that might happen to be able to make any sort of decision. And so it also led me down this trajectory of like really trying to figure out why does the university and higher education costs so much?

We live in a country that says that you have to have a degree to get a job. But then it makes the process of getting that degree, actually a penalty on poor people. And as the data shows on people of color. And so, what does, what does that mean for all of us? If what we’re really doing to be able to achieve the American dream is taking on so much debt.

So I think that this debt has not only impacted me personally, in terms of what life decisions I make on all of that sort of fun stuff. And like, do I buy a house? Hmm, no. Or like, do I move to Albuquerque? Yes. And it’s, it’s cheap here. That’s great. And it’s also beautiful here, but also I did purposely move to New Mexico because the cost of living is more affordable and that helps with debt issues and all that sort of stuff.

But it also really led me on this political trajectory as well. Like really getting to understand- like this conversation that you and I are having right now, from other debtors, what they’re experiencing and seeing that it’s not an individual problem. Like I’m not, I’m not alone, as we love to say in The Debt Collective.

I- there’s just so many of us who are actually struggling with debt. And when there’s 45 million people who have debt, then it’s definitely not an individual problem. It’s a political problem. And that means it demands a political solution. So, yeah, it’s definitely led my life in many different ways.

Nikki Nolan: I would love to know a little bit more about your story.

Umme Hoque: I am a first-generation American. I grew up with, and I truly like believed in wanting to achieve the American dream. Like I knew my family came to this country for a better life. They came from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world that I always wanted to achieve to be able to be successful as many immigrants do, as many people in general do. Especially, like, first-time college folks and all that sort of stuff.

And so higher education was always something that I was going to do. And the question was like, what career path did I want to do? And all that sort of fun stuff. And so, it was always really clear to me and really important that I needed to really be successful so that I could achieve that American dream.

And it necessitated- because, my family doesn’t have intergenerational wealth. We don’t have, we didn’t come to this country with a bunch of money. We were struggling from the onset and really just trying to make it work like many immigrants do- that I would have to take on debt to be able to achieve this dream that also, like, helped me to decide which college I was going to go to. Because I tried to be the best student in class, but that doesn’t mean that you can qualify for every scholarship and you can’t necessarily be able to achieve in that sort of way. So even being able to go to school, I had to take on all of this debt to be able to, to achieve that. And then when I decided to go back for graduate school, that was even more debt.

And then it just became apparent to me, especially because I went to graduate school overseas in the UK, where university is just more affordable. And for some folks it’s free. Whereas like, Oh, this is- the system is maybe not a dream. Maybe there’s a nightmare in there. Like maybe the reality of telling people that this is the country where anyone can achieve isn’t necessarily true if the other side of that is they have to take on all this debt. They have to work all the time. They have to struggle just to get by. They themselves don’t feel like they can achieve in that sort of way. And there were so many other countries and other people who have education systems that really value education and the ways that, that makes people in their society able to contribute more, able to be happier, able to have things like dreams and homes and families. Which so many of our members of The Debt Collective have like had to balance, you know, just because we’re worried about our debt.

So I think that, like, with all of these factors, I started to realize that, yeah, maybe it’s time that we revisit this American dream and make it just a bit more realistic. Or go back to it because there was a time in this country where university was affordable. There was a time when university was free.

And it wasn’t until the Reagan era that the federal government really started cutting all of the funding that was from federal government for universities and then state governments started cutting those costs as well.

And we know that student loan debt has ballooned by a hundred percent in the past 10 years. So this is a new problem. It’s a political problem. And that means that we can all fix it together because it’s not something that’s written in the history books as ‘it’s gotta be this way.’ It’s something that’s so new that we can actually address it together, which is exciting.

Nikki Nolan: That concept that it wasn’t always like this, I think a lot of people don’t realize that the world wasn’t always like this. People weren’t in massive amounts of student debt forever. It’s a relatively new concept and it. A previous guest said it is not the laws of physics. We are not trying to break something that is fundamentally true.

We are trying to fix something that is fundamentally flawed.

I would love to know just, cause I don’t think we hit on this, when you were a child, did you have a specific dream?

Umme Hoque: When I was younger, I wanted to be an architect or a journalist. So those are the two. And then I’m not really great at math anyway, but architecture is more expensive than a journalism or writing degree anyway. So, I mean, even in that regard, you know, picking where you end up going to school ends up being a debt and cost question, unfortunately, as well.

I did end up studying mass communication and journalism and English, and all that sort of stuff, because I did want to work in that field. And even the media field right now struggles with the ability to find work and the ability for that work to be permanent types of work.

I ended up working in that field for a long time, but I didn’t make it my forever- career partially because I was struggling with the wages and being able to pay off my debt while making less than $30,000 a year at that time, about 10 years ago.

But then also because of this real dimension of learning and realizing that this debt would be with me forever and that so many other people were struggling with it too. And realizing that there was, there was an opportunity there to really be thinking more about the political dimensions of it and the ways that we could address that together. And so that’s also why I went back to school and started looking at international affairs and international politics to kind of better understand the way the world works.

Kind of going back to what you were just saying too about these problems, they’re not something that is the law of physics. So if we can change it, how do we change it? And how can we learn from other examples where things are a bit more functional, or where things are just a bit different, and actually implement those systems in other places- and all of that sort of stuff. So I feel kind of, I’ve been on such a windy road because of that.

I just, like, I started on this trajectory where I was like, Oh, I’m going to do this thing. And then instead of like, ended up way over here. And I’m moving my hands around, which I’m realizing that people on the podcast can’t see, but that’s what I’m doing. And they’re just going all over the place.

But, that’s, that’s how it all happened.

Nikki Nolan: You know, it’s interesting that I think a lot of the reason that we go to school and this is just like my working hypothesis based on just interviewing folks- not, not based on any kind of empirical study- is that we all start off with like a dream. And so much of society is like, do this, do this, and, you know, build yourself up so you go to this school. But the reality is, is, is so skewed.

Like, you are set up to do this thing. And because you have these hopes and dreams, they can really be taken advantage of, especially within a school system. And I know that we sorta talked about this, but one of my guests was talking about how these for-profit predatory schools started spinning off, specifically after the 2008 financial crisis when public schools started getting less federal funding and they started relying really heavily on student debt. And they could take in less people. And so it started preying upon people’s hopes and dreams of a better life.

And what is playing out, in reality, is that going to school to fulfill your hopes and dreams, there’s a reality mismatch there. And this sort of upward mobility tax, which you have sort of touched upon a little bit about, if you are from a family and they can’t necessarily fund your education, in order for you to even get that upper momentum to be successful- because of your student debt, you’re already set back maybe 20, 30 years. It’s really this upward mobility tax.

There is an interesting article that came out that only 32 people have actually qualified for loan forgiveness or how we like to say cancellation. And the reason we say cancellation is because we did nothing wrong going to school, so we don’t need people’s forgiveness. We don’t need their forgiveness. We need them to cancel it, which I think is a good point because some people don’t understand why we use the word cancel instead of forgiveness.

But yeah, people have waited 20, 25 years, which is the, if you’re on the Pay As You Earn or income-based, and you’re on I believe a direct loan or a federal loan within 20 years or 25 years, they’re supposed to be able to get the cancellation of your debt. But only 32 people have achieved that.

My last guests asked, this, and I have never asked anybody this, but how do we win? How do we actually, and this cancellation, on a policy level, on a governmental level to cancel- it’s between 91 and 92% of all student debt is owned by the federal government.

What are some of the collective ideas for how we win this?

Umme Hoque: I’m an organizer. So I think we win this by building people power. And I think that we’re showing, like, we’ve shown that this is really possible, right? We learned this week that we canceled another billion, which means like through The Debt Collective collectively, I think we’ve canceled over $2 billion worth of debt.

And we saw on the campaign trail, Joe Biden, a man who’s from like the debt slash credit card capital of the world says, I’ll cancel some debt. Being able to watch that narrative trajectory and see, like, Senator Chuck Schumer say that we should cancel debt is actually showing that we’re winning.

And so if we just keep building our power and keep building pressure, we can cancel not only the federal debt, which Joe Biden does have the authority to do with the flick of a pen, but we can keep building our numbers and cancel all of the student debt and move to a better education system where we have tuition-free college. And then we actually have education as a public good.

That’s our vision and The Debt Collective because just canceling debt is great and important and necessary for all of the people who are struggling right now and are struggling into the future. But if we don’t actually address the overall system, that’s caused all this harm, it’s just going to happen again. And that’s not fair to anyone and that’s not how we’re building a better future together.

And so we are focused right now on building our Biden Jubilee 100 campaign that I mentioned earlier. We’ve got folks who are on debt, strike, refusing to pay their debt. We symbolically represent the first 100 days, which is why we’re the Biden Jubilee 100. Um, we’ve got the upcoming week of action so that people can take action in their local areas, whether they’re on debt strike or not to show how important this issue is to them.

And hopefully, we’re going to win cancellation. Well, I believe we’re going to win cancellation. I throw hopefully in there, cause sometimes I’m a cynic. But we’ll win federal cancellation and we’re not going to stop there because the other thing that happened with the COVID relief package is that they ensured that any sort of debt cancellation in the next five years is tax-free and that’s private or federal.

And that means that we’ve got a good amount of space there to keep fighting together to win full cancellation of all student loan debt. If we keep building our movement and take part in this moment, we’ve actually got a lot of time in there to be able to not only win this and use that win to build more momentum to win full cancellation but then to actually reform our higher education system in general.

There was legislation that was introduced in the last legislative session around college for all and making the university system fairer. And The Debt Collective was at that introduction with Senator Sanders and, all of the, the folks who introduced that legislation.

So if that legislation gets reintroduced or whatever that looks like into the future, we’ll be able to address also fixing our higher education system or taking steps toward that.

So we’ve really got a lot of opportunity right now, I’ll be honest for us, to be able to do something amazing together. It’s a really hard time, like we’re in a global pandemic where millions of people are losing their jobs. So many people are losing their homes. It’s absolutely horrendous, but there is an opportunity here for us to take our collective power and collective struggle and convert it into not only canceling debt, but building something better together into the future and addressing these harms and transforming our country and our education into the thing that we want it to be. The thing that it should be, where people feel like they can flourish and learn the things that they want to learn and do the jobs that they want to do. Isn’t that the world that we truly deserve?

Nikki Nolan: You sort of touched upon this, but have you ever seen a system that’s actually functioning that that would be a good model for people to look into?

Umme Hoque: That’s a great question. Every country is different and I am not an academic or an expert in, in, like what higher education should look like. That’s my caveat. Like I am an organizer. That’s my, that’s my jam. So if you want to talk about, but I have lived overseas and I’ve been very lucky to be able to experience that and seeing other education systems.

So I mentioned the UK before, where I went to graduate school, where people were able to even like- it wasn’t entirely free for everyone, but there were people who were paying only a couple thousand pounds a semester. As opposed to tens of thousands of dollars. And I also lived in Australia for a number of years as well where I would tell my friends about how much debt I had and they would like nearly spit out their drink and their food, because it just didn’t make sense to them.

And that’s a system where university isn’t free, but it’s much, much cheaper. And then when you graduate, you only start paying it back once you reach a certain income that you’re being paid and they take it out of your paycheck. So it’s not something that you do yourself and that way it’s actually measured against your income level as well.

So, there’s lots of different programs. There’s some places where it’s entirely free. And that is the way the education system exists. But some places where it costs very little money, but then the way you pay it back is not the same way that we do here. But, in no system does a predatory lending program lead to flourishing. I’ll be honest with you on that one. Right?

There’s definitely lots of examples from overseas that we could all look at and learn about and think about what would work here, because I appreciate that the US is a different context. And we have all of these very specific ways that our university systems are set up and we’d need to think about how we’re supporting teachers and students, and making sure that we’re being fair in the process.

But there is absolutely no reason that we need to believe that we just have to keep this bad system and just keep it into the future. Like, there’s just so much evidence out there that it’s not working for any of us. And too many people are struggling here. And that it is working in other places. And we could learn from those other places and develop our own model that really works for America that allows that we achieve these broader goals around making sure that people don’t literally just go into debt just to be able to get a job out of college. It’s literally such a terrible pipeline that we’ve built for people to be able to, to succeed or get any type of work in this country. And so there’s just so many things look at and reevaluate

Nikki Nolan: Agree. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you would like to talk about?

Umme Hoque: One of my things I do like to talk about is about the racial aspect of this. It’s because my work background is I was a traditional labor organizer for the majority of my career. But that means I’ve done a lot of work in specific workplaces and industries as well. Like trying to work on increasing wages or making better working conditions, helping people unlock their own power within their workplace.

And I think one of the aspects of debt that I always think about, and I don’t know if everyone does, and so I’m just going to talk about it. Is that like for families like mine, where you don’t have intergenerational wealth and so you end up taking on all of these loans to be able to go to school, the majority of those families tend to be communities, from communities of color, because we’re struggling with intergenerational wealth because of histories of slavery or racism or immigration or whatever that looks like.

We’re not the only ones, of course, but the majority of folks who are taking that on, that’s the largest portion. And then once we graduate from college because of the radicalized aspect of our workforce as well, we end up typically making less money. And so when you put all of these factors together, it’s the reason why Black women default the most on their loans and graduate with the largest amount of student loan debt. These are like factors compounding on top of other factors to exacerbate on equal systems within our country. And so canceling the debt is a really incredible way of closing the racial gap in terms of, that type of equality.

But it’s also a way of thinking about the fact that. There’s overall injustices in our system that we have to, that we’re trying to fix. And that we have to address as part of repairing this harm. And it’s the reason why so many people who are struggling right now are people who started with very little. And as, after they graduate, they’re receiving less pay and so they’re struggling even more and more.

So this is an issue that intersects on so many different problems that we’re trying to address as a country right now it seems like. You know, around racial equity, around inequality in general, around billionaires, around like people losing jobs. It’s just truly an opportunity for us to address so many harms by canceling debt and then reforming our education system in general. It’s one of the reasons that I’m really passionate about it. So I just have to talk about it.

Nikki Nolan: No, it’s- thank you so much for talking about it. Yeah. It’s, it’s really, there are so many wins that would happen in this cancellation.

Do you have any advice that you would give to your younger self, knowing what you know now?

Umme Hoque: I grew up in Texas. And I grew up in a smaller, like a smaller, more conservative town. I didn’t know that organizing and activism was a thing. I feel like if I could go back and talk to my younger version of myself, I would just be like, the American dream is fake and also like you should look into activism. There’s some like really cool, cool stuff.

And also we are literally designing all these systems together. Like everything is just an experience that we have the opportunity to build movement around, and challenge injustices together.

And I feel like growing up, I really thought that, you know, the Constitution was the way it was. The political system was the way it was. I thought that you had, like, you have to take on debt and debt has always been a part of our education system. And as I get older, as I learn more, as I hear from other people about what education is like in their country, Or the fact that they, like me, are struggling with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of debt, I really obvious that these things that I thought were true when I was younger are definitely not true. And sometimes I’m like, ah, younger Umme if only you had known then, and maybe you wouldn’t have taken on this debt or maybe you would have become an organizer a lot earlier, or something cool like that. But you know, you live and learn.

Nikki Nolan: Okay, well, we’re coming to the end. Is there anything you would like to pitch?

Umme Hoque: Always. If people are interested in getting involved in the movement to cancel debt and transform our education system, go to debtcollective.org. Check out our week of action. That’s coming up in the last week of March. Check out our campaigns in general, because we’re not stopping with federal student debt.

We’re going to cancel all the debt and we’re going to make sure that we’re all working together to really transform education in this country. And we need to build a people-powered movement to do that. So check it out.

Nikki Nolan: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here today.

Umme Hoque: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been just a real pleasure.

Nikki Nolan: Matter of Life and Debt is produced by me Nikki Nolan.

Special thanks to Efe Akmen for creating the music and mastering the audio.

Additional support and thanks to Sarah Thibault  who writes the information and transcripts about each episode.

This podcast would not have been possible without them.

Visit our website for more information matteroflifeanddebt.com, where you can listen, read transcripts, get additional context of the subjects you just heard about, and subscribe- absolutely for free. That website again, matteroflifeanddebt.com. Thanks again for listening.

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