While we have written about the opportunities for financial organisations willing to provide credit to students, there can also be a downside to this market that has perhaps been overlooked by financiers eager to build their student loans books. The problem is activism and not the weak-kneed sort of stuff that many banks easily ignore. It probably doesn’t matter whether it’s anti-war, anti-animal testing, anti-globalisation or anti-anything; tertiary student organisations can be extremely well organised and their protests can hurt.
Just ask JP Morgan Chase in the US, where black campaign groups led by The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparation in America (NCOBRA) are calling on student organisations and their members to boycott the bank because it has refused to settle a slave trade reparation claim dating from the 1860s. JP Morgan Chase now owns part of a bank that between 1830 and 1860 either owned slaves or allowed their owners to use slaves as collateral for loans.
Now the activists who want reparations are mobilising students for the simple reason that JP Morgan Chase has a student lending business worth an estimated US$9b. Thus far the campaigners have failed in their class actions against several well-known banks. JP Morgan Chase have set up a multimillion dollar scholarship fund for black Louisianan students but this has failed to satisfy the activists whose alliance with student organisations may yet prove a successful and painful technique for pursuing grievances against commercial organisations involved in education. There has already been an attempt to sue Lloyds over slavery, so UK banks you have been warned; and may the Wilberforce be with you.
