The Mortgaging of Sons and Daughters

 

Commentary · Education, Finance & Human Capital

A Letter from America — on the capping of Parent PLUS loans, the abolition of tuition in Guyana, and the two nations’ opposite answers to the same question.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · June 29, 2026

There is a passage in the fifth chapter of Nehemiah that I cannot read this Sunday without thinking of America. The walls of Jerusalem are going up, the work is holy, and yet a cry rises from the people — not against the enemy outside the gate but against the burden within. To eat, to pay the tribute, to keep the family on its small parcel of land, ordinary families have begun to borrow. And the collateral they pledge, when the fields and the vineyards are gone, is their own children. We bring into bondage our sons and our daughters. Nehemiah’s reform, when it comes, is not a stimulus and not a subsidy. It is a restraint. He gathers the nobles and the lenders and tells them to stop the usury, to restore what has been taken, to release the mortgaged children. He understood something that every finance minister learns late: that a society can lose its people not to conquest but to compound interest.

I have been thinking about Nehemiah because of a quieter act of legislation here, folded into the long bill that the President signed last July 4th — the one given the unembarrassed name of the One Big Beautiful Bill.^[2] Among its many provisions is a reform of the Federal Parent PLUS Loan, the instrument through which, for four decades, American parents have borrowed to send their children to university. Beginning the first of July this year, that instrument is being capped. Where a parent could once borrow up to the full cost of attendance — effectively without ceiling — the new rule fixes a limit: twenty thousand dollars a year, sixty-five thousand over a lifetime, and the ceiling attaches to the child, not the parent.^[3] Mother and father may each fill out the forms, but they cannot stack their hopes one atop the other to clear the bill; their borrowing is summed and capped as one. Families already inside the old system are grandfathered for a few more years.^[3] Everyone arriving new will meet the wall.

I. What a Cap Is

I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to read this only as a closing of a door, and the truth is more interesting than the grievance.

An uncapped loan is a strange object. It has no focal point. Thomas Schelling — whose work on coordination and the salience of a number sits behind so much of how I read both classrooms and treasuries — taught us that when two parties must converge without speaking, they reach for the obvious figure, the round number, the line on the map.^[4] Unlimited is the absence of any such line. And a subsidy without a line has a way of being eaten by the very thing it was meant to help. American economists have argued for years, under the inelegant banner of the “Bennett hypothesis,” that when the federal government stands ready to lend whatever a college charges, the college discovers it can charge more.^[5] The hypothesis takes its name from then-Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, who wrote in a 1987 New York Times op-ed that “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.”^[5] Subsequent research has confirmed that the passthrough effect is real, though variable: a Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond study found that tuition passthrough rates were at their highest in the late 1980s — precisely when Bennett articulated his hypothesis — and that the introduction of unsubsidized loans in 1993 drove a new round of price increases before the effect attenuated again.^[6] The open spigot does not lower the price of the water; it raises it. The parent who borrows without limit is not made freer by the absence of the limit. He is made available — to the institution, to the interest rate, to the long arithmetic of repayment that now, under the same bill, comes with fewer mercies than before.

So one can read the cap as a cruelty, and many families will feel it as one. The student whose parents can no longer cover the gap will turn to private lenders, to a cosigner’s signature, to the older and harder market that judges a family by its credit score before it judges a child by his promise. That is real, and I do not minimize it.

“The deeper failure was never that the ceiling was too low. It was that there was no ceiling, and that a public good as fundamental as the education of the next generation had been quietly converted into private household debt, handed up a generation rather than down.” — T.R.B.

But one can also read the cap as Nehemiah read the problem: as a refusal to let the mortgaging of sons and daughters run without end. The discipline of a number — twenty thousand, sixty-five — is not only austerity. It is design. The deeper failure was never that the ceiling was too low. It was that there was no ceiling, and that a public good as fundamental as the education of the next generation had been quietly converted into private household debt, handed up a generation rather than down. Proverbs tells us that a good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.^[7] We had built a machine that does the opposite — that leaves the debt to the children, and the children to the debt.

II. The Mirror Across the Water

Now turn the globe a quarter turn, to a small country on the shoulder of South America that I have spent my life thinking about.

While America was drawing its line, Guyana was erasing one. In October of 2024, in a special address to the Twelfth Parliament, President Ali announced that beginning the first of January 2025, tuition at the University of Guyana would be abolished — fully, for new and continuing students, for the diploma and the bachelor’s and the master’s and the doctorate alike.^[8] By the spring the policy was real; the application queue at Turkeyen was running past a thousand a week, with total applications reportedly surpassing sixteen thousand.^[9] The government has, alongside it, begun to write off the old student loans that families carried — small sums by Wall Street’s measure, ruinous by Sophia’s.^[10] The bill for all of this is paid, of course, by oil: the Stabroek barrels that have turned the poorest economy in the hemisphere into its fastest-growing one in the span of a single decade, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration reporting Guyana’s emergence as a major new contributor to global crude supply.^[11]

Here is the symmetry that should make us sit up. At the very hour the wealthier nation is capping what families may borrow to be educated, the poorer nation is using a windfall to make the borrowing unnecessary. America is privatizing the debt of learning onto the household. Guyana is socializing the cost of learning onto the commonwealth of the resource. Two countries, two opposite motions, the same underlying question: who shall pay for the next generation, and in what coin?

And there is a further turn, which is the kind of detail that keeps a Sunday essayist honest. Guyana is not introducing free university for the first time. It is restoring it. The University of Guyana was tuition-free until 1994, when, in a season of structural adjustment and empty coffers, fees were introduced — under a government of the same party that has now removed them.^[10] So the arc is not a straight line of progress. It is a circle: provision, then debt, then provision again, each turn dictated less by philosophy than by the balance of the treasury. We did not abolish fees in 1994 because we had decided education was a private good. We abolished free education because we were broke. And we have restored it now not purely because we have grown wise but because we have struck oil. The principle followed the money both times. That should trouble anyone who wants to believe a nation’s commitment to its children is a matter of conviction rather than cash flow.

III. Rodney’s Ledger

Walter Rodney, whose forty-sixth anniversary we marked not long ago in these pages — he was killed by a bomb in Georgetown on June 13, 1980^[12] — taught us to read development as a ledger of extraction: to ask, of any transaction between the strong and the weak, who is accumulating and who is being drained. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he argued that colonial economies were designed not for balanced growth but for the systematic transfer of surplus outward, leaving the periphery poorer in proportion to the metropole’s enrichment.^[13] The Parent PLUS loan is, in miniature, a Rodneyan object. It takes the aspiration of a working family — the entirely honorable wish to see a daughter become the first to hold a degree — and converts it into a stream of interest payments flowing toward an institution and a lender. The surplus moves upward. The family carries the principal.

Lloyd Best would have called this what it is: a plantation logic in a new costume. Best, the Trinidadian economist who developed the Plantation Economy model, argued that the plantation was never merely an agricultural arrangement but an economic logic — one defined by external control and, crucially, by a forward claim on the laborer’s life and output.^[14] Modern educational debt owns the forward claim on the graduate’s earnings — and, through the parent, on the earnings of the generation that bore her. To cap that claim, then, is not nothing. Whatever the cruelty of the closed door, there is also a small dismantling of the machine that pledges children against the future.

But Best would also have issued a warning to Georgetown, and I will issue it on his behalf. Oil is a spigot too. A windfall without a focal point is precisely the uncapped loan written at national scale — the same Schelling problem in a larger hand. To fund free tuition from a barrel price is to make the education of a generation hostage to a commodity cycle we do not control and a reservoir that will not refill. The discipline of the cap that wounds America is the discipline Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund will need if today’s gift is not to become tomorrow’s austerity — the third turn of the same sad circle.^[15] Free today, fees tomorrow, when the price breaks. The question is not whether to be generous. It is whether the generosity rests on a rule or on a rumor of plenty.

IV. The Beam

Let me end where these essays so often end for me — with a particular face, because the abstractions are only worth anything if they survive contact with a life.

The argument I have made my whole career, from Medgar Evers to the Institute and back, is that access and excellence are not rivals but the same thing seen from two ends. The beam that connects a small nation to the wider world runs through a subsidized classroom. Clarence Trotz, ninety-two years old, former headmaster of Queen’s College from 1974 to 1980 and still teaching physics over Microsoft Teams to a student in Bartica who has no other teacher,^[16] sent boys into the world who would not otherwise have gone — and one of them, Keith Wilson, ended at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he helped pioneer the optical-communications experiments that now beam data between spacecraft and Earth.^[17] Walter Rodney himself was a scholarship boy.^[12] The path from a Georgetown desk to a Princeton library or a Pasadena lab was never paved with private credit. It was paved with provision — with a society that decided, in its better moments, to carry the cost of a mind it could not yet see the value of.

“The path from a Georgetown desk to a Princeton library or a Pasadena lab was never paved with private credit. It was paved with provision — with a society that decided, in its better moments, to carry the cost of a mind it could not yet see the value of.” — T.R.B.

The American diaspora has always known this in its own way. We have run, for generations, an informal Parent PLUS program with no statute and no interest rate — the barrel sent home, the money order for school fees, the cousin in Brooklyn or Queens carrying a nephew’s tuition because the family in Alexander Village asked. It is uncapped, voluntary, and held together by love and obligation rather than law. I have argued before in these pages that we ought to make it deliberate — a diaspora education bond that does on purpose what the remittance does by accident.^[18] The lesson of this season, on both shores, is that the financing of a generation is too important to be left to either the open spigot or the closed door. It wants a rule, a covenant, a focal point we choose together.

Our own constitution, in Article 40, speaks of a life free from want and of the dignity that the state owes the person.^[19] I have argued that this is not poetry but a justiciable promise. A nation that takes it seriously does not ask whether it can afford to educate its children. It asks what kind of ceiling it can build that will still be standing when the oil is gone — a line drawn not in fear and not in windfall, but in covenant.

And here I must be honest about my own place in this, because it is easy to theorize a ceiling from a chair I did not always sit in. When you are poor and talented, the mortgage is not really a choice. The alternative to the debt is the foreclosure of your own capacity, and no one with a gift and a family watching refuses that trade. I would sign the papers. I have signed them. The investment is real — in the self, in the family, in the whole line that one educated person pulls upward behind them. To counsel the talented poor against it out of a fear of debt would be its own cruelty, and a comfortable one.

But the rationality of the decision and the justice of the system that compels it are two different things, and the second does not dissolve because the first is settled. The talented rich invest in themselves too; they are simply not asked to collateralize their children to do it. Same investment, different price — and the price is indexed to how poor you began. That is the forward claim in its quietest form: a society that says yes, invest in yourself, and then takes its cut of the return for having permitted you. The necessity that makes the mortgage unavoidable is not a fact of nature. It was legislated, and it can be legislated otherwise. Nehemiah’s families had to mortgage their children too — the harvest had failed and the tribute was due, and their logic was sound. He did not praise them for the soundness of it. He treated the necessity itself as the scandal.

Nehemiah did not cancel the wall to save the children, and he did not sacrifice the children to finish the wall. He restored what had been mortgaged and then kept building. That is the harder, holier arithmetic. It is the one both our countries are being asked, this season, to learn.

Walk good.

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References

1. Nehemiah 5:4–5. Revival and Reformation Bible. revivalandreformation.org
2. U.S. Internal Revenue Service. “One Big Beautiful Bill” provisions. Signed into law July 4, 2025, as Public Law 119-21. irs.gov
3. Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA). “How the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Impacts Student Loans: Parents.” pheaa.org
4. “Focal Point (Game Theory).” Wikipedia. wikipedia.org
5. Robinson, Jenna A. “The Bennett Hypothesis Turns 30.” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 2017. jamesgmartin.center
6. Gordon, Grey and Aaron Hedlund. “Do Student Loans Drive Up College Tuition?” Economic Brief No. 22-32. Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, August 2022. richmondfed.org
7. Proverbs 13:22 (New International Version). Bible Gateway. biblegateway.com
8. Department of Public Information, Government of Guyana. “University of Guyana Free from 2025, President Ali Announces.” October 10, 2024. dpi.gov.gy
9. Ministry of Education, Government of Guyana. “UG Expanding Hybrid Learning as Applications Surge.” education.gov.gy
10. Canada Caribbean Institute. “Tuition Fees at University of Guyana to be Abolished from January 2025.” October 10, 2024. canadacaribbeaninstitute.org
11. U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Today in Energy: Guyana crude oil production.” May 21, 2024. eia.gov
12. National Security Archive, George Washington University. “The Walter Rodney Murder Mystery in Guyana, 40 Years Later.” June 13, 2020. nsarchive.gwu.edu
13. Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE). “Europe Underdeveloped Africa: the Legacy of Walter Rodney.” December 16, 2021. roape.net
14. Best, Lloyd. “Outlines of a Model of Pure Plantation Economy.” Social and Economic Studies. JSTOR. jstor.org
15. Guyana Business Journal. “Balancing Accountability and Flexibility: Lessons from Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund.” December 2024. guyanabusinessjournal.com
16. Stabroek News. “Educator Extraordinaire: Clarence Trotz Still Teaching at 92.” March 15, 2026. stabroeknews.com
17. ResearchGate. “Keith E. Wilson — Scientific Contributions.” researchgate.net
18. Brookings Institution. “Diaspora Bonds: An Innovative Source of Financing.” brookings.edu
19. Constitute Project. “Guyana’s Constitution of 1980 with Amendments through 2016,” Article 40. constituteproject.org

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