‘I Don’t Like Owing Anybody Money’: Why Latino Students Avoid College Loans

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Andres Mendoza leaves work an hour early so he can get home in time for his online classes.

When he gets home, he lets his wiener dog Draco outside, then logs onto Blackboard to get his latest assignments.

“It’s only technically nine questions, but it’s really probably about 40 questions,” Mendoza said, looking over his accounting assignment on a recent Tuesday afternoon. “This actually doesn’t look too bad. I might not be doing homework all night today. Okay, this isn’t that bad. That’s a relief.”

Mendoza is 25 and a junior at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He works full time and goes to college part time so he can support himself without going into debt.

Like many Latino college students in San Antonio, Mendoza is wary of student loans.

“I’ve never liked to owe anybody money, regardless if it’s $5.50. I don’t like owing anybody money, so having to owe the government money is even worse,” he said.

San Antonio’s Black and Latino college students are significantly more likely to avoid taking out student loans because they’re afraid they won’t be able to pay them back.

In a survey Texas Public Radio sent to students currently or recently enrolled in one of San Antonio’s public institutions of higher education, Hispanic students were just as likely as white students to take out loans. But the reasons they didn’t take out loans varied depending on their race and ethnicity.

A little more than half of the Black and Latino survey respondents said they didn’t take out loans because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to pay them back. However, only 34% of white respondents expressed the same fear. That’s compared to 72% of white students who said they could get by without loans.

According to college finance expert Sandy Baum with the Urban Institute, avoiding student loans when you have a hard time paying for college without it can reduce a student’s chances of graduating.

“Even though the public discourse is very much about how borrowing too much can be a problem, there is some pretty strong evidence that not borrowing enough can also be a problem,” Baum said. “The issue is pretty straightforward: if you take a loan instead of working the extra hours to get that money, then you have more time to devote to your studies.”

Mendoza originally planned to go to Texas State University after high school, but he didn’t receive enough financial aid. Like a lot of middle income families, his parents made too much money for him to qualify for the Pell Grant, but not enough to be able to afford tuition, room and board without loans.

“I mean, they could have paid for it, but my circumstances were a little bit difficult. My senior year, my grandpa had actually passed away on like, the first day of my senior year. And then, unexpectedly, my uncle — who was supposed to take care of everybody over there, he passed away from pancreatic cancer,” Mendoza said. “My parents being the good people that they are, forked over a lot of money to help with the funeral expenses, so I didn’t want to throw another big lump sum of money at them.”

Instead, Mendoza opted to stay in Corpus Christi and go to the local community college, Del Mar.

“My parents were happy to pay for me to go to community college, because it was significantly cheaper,” Mendoza said. “We made it out with no debt or anything like that, and it was a blessing in disguise, honestly.”

Now that he’s older, Mendoza is eligible for some need-based financial aid because he files independently from his parents, but it doesn’t cover everything. He charges the occasional textbook to a credit card, and works full time to cover his living expenses without taking out student loans.

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