This past Sunday, during a commencement speech given by Robert F. Smith, a billionaire investor, he promised to pay off the college debts of Morehouse’s graduating class of 2019. During his speech, he said, “On behalf of the eight generations of my family who have been in this country, we’re going to put a little fuel in your bus.” He continued on to say, “Now, I know my class will make sure they pay this forward. I want my class to look at these (alumni) — these beautiful Morehouse brothers — and let’s make sure every class has the same opportunity going forward because we are enough to take care of our own community. We are enough to ensure we have all the opportunities of the American dream.”

Smith, a former chemical engineer an investment banker, is a businessman investor, and philanthropist. Ranked as the 163^rd richest person in America, he has a net worth of $5 billion as of 2019. He attended Columbia Business School and Cornell University. What many people don’t know is that he is the first African American to hold the position as the board chairman of Carnegie Hall, and Cornell University’s Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is named after him. Before offering to pay off the entire student loans of the Morehouse graduates, he donated $1.5 million to the school for scholarships and a park to be built in January earlier this year.

So, why is this so revolutionary? Because he is one of the first billionaires who has offered to do this. The even crazier part about it is that he isn’t even the richest person in America and he still is able to afford to pay off those debts. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is estimated to be worth so much that he could pay off the students’ debts of all students in America over 3,000 times over. There is no reason an individual should make that much money, and just hoard it all. He would be able to pay debts off that many times, even after losing half of everything he had to his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, earlier this year.

This story was bittersweet for me because I was overjoyed to hear that those people didn’t have to pay back an estimated $10-40 million in student debts. However, college should not cost that much and put people in crippling debt to further their education and make a better life for themselves. This is why student loan and credit card business is predatory. They perch their self on college campuses like vultures, looking for a young unsuspecting victim to scam. College should either be free or at such a low cost, it would be of no burden to the student to pay because in 2019 it feels as if you need a bachelor’s degree to even sweep floors at McDonald’s. Education should be a right, not a privilege. This is why the people who are able to afford college get richer, and people who aren’t stay underprivileged and poor. It feels as if this was designed on purpose to make people in compromising positions, stay that way. Until college is free, we need people like Smith to step in and use their abundance of wealth to help bridge the gaps.