How Black Women Experience Student Debt
A new Brief from The Education Trust is the first in a four-part series using qualitative data from the National Black Student Debt Study. The forthcoming briefs will be released over the next few months and will cover income-driven repayment plans, the impact of student debt on mental health, and Parent PLUS loans. Forty-five million Americans collectively owe student loan debt. Women hold nearly two-thirds of that debt, and because of the gender pay gap, are more likely than men to have trouble paying off their debt. Black borrowers are the group most negatively affected by student loans. Black women enroll in college at higher rates than Black men, but because they exist at the intersection of two marginalized identities and experience sexism and racism at the same time, they make less money and often need to borrow more to cover the cost of attendance, and struggle significantly with repayment. Financial aid hasn’t kept pace with college costs, which are now unaffordable for most Americans. In 1980, the maximum Pell Grant, the nation’s most important need-based grant, covered more than 50% of the full cost of a public four-year college; in the 2020-21 academic year, it covered only 28%, driving many students to borrow to make up the difference. A year after completing a bachelor’s degree, Black women hold more student debt than any other group, with an average of $38,800 in federal undergraduate loans. Black female borrowers who attended graduate school hold an average of $58,252 in graduate loans. The Brief can be obtained here.
National Imperative To Improve Nursing Home Care Quality
Nursing homes play a unique dual role in the long-term care continuum, serving as a place where patients receive needed health care and a place they call home. Ineffective responses to the complex challenges of nursing home care have resulted in a system that often fails to ensure the well-being and safety of nursing home residents. The devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nursing home residents and staff has renewed attention to the long-standing weaknesses that impede the provision of high-quality nursing home care. With support from a coalition of sponsors, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine formed the Committee on the Quality of Care in Nursing Homes to examine how the United States delivers, finances, regulates, and measures the quality of nursing home care. The National Imperative to Improve Nursing Home Quality: Honoring Our Commitment to Residents, Families, and Staff identifies seven broad goals and supporting recommendations which provide the overarching framework for a comprehensive approach to improving the quality of care in nursing homes. The report can be obtained here.
Fair Share Spending By NonProfit Hospitals For Their Communities
Nonprofit hospital systems are expected to return to their communities in amounts that justify their massive tax breaks. A new report from the health care think tank, the Lown Institute, indicates that this result is rarely the case. A determination shows that 227 of the 275 systems studied had fair share deficits, meaning they spent less on charity care and community investment than the value of their tax exemption. Adding the fair share deficits of all hospital systems together reveals $18.4 billion in stranded dollars that could have been used to advance health equity, housing, food insecurity, and other local needs. The 10 private nonprofit hospital systems with the largest fair share deficits (FY 2019) account for $5.6 billion of the $18.4 billion total fair share deficit. Many of these systems also received hundreds of millions from the CARES Act in 2020 and ended the year with high net incomes. In seven states, the total fair share deficit for all hospitals exceeded $1 billion (CA, PA, NY, OH, IL, MI, MA). Data sources were hospital tax filings from fiscal year ending 2019, the most recent year available for most hospitals. Information on hospital systems’ CARES Act grant funding and excess revenue were obtained through hospitals’ public audited financial statements. The report can be obtained here.