In a moment that instantly went viral in 2019, Morehouse commencement speaker Robert F. Smith surprised graduates at the 135th ceremony with the news that he would be paying off all their student loans. Now Smith, in partnership with Live Nation Urban and the city of Atlanta, wants to help even more HBCU students struggling with loans through his Student Freedom Initiative.
According to the organization, the goal was to provide a scalable solution to the $1.7 trillion student loan debt crisis, where 43 million borrowers hold an average student loan debt balance of $38,000 each.
“If we want to really prepare and equip future generations to be able to afford college, we need scalable solutions where everyone has skin in the game,” Smith wrote in an op-ed for Time magazine last year. “Families and students across the country are faced with the rising costs of college tuition. At the rate we are going, it will take the average American family 75 years to send just one student to a top-rated university.”…