Student who left Morehouse speaks out after billionaire vows to pay class’ loans

A former class of 2019 student who left Morehouse College two years ago over mounting student loan debt is weighing in after a billionaire investor pledged to pay off the student debt for this year’s graduating class.

Jordan Long, 22, told BuzzFeed News that while Morehouse’s 2019 graduating class is lucky to receive the donation from Robert F. Smith, this year’s commencement speaker, not all students get to experience “fairytale syndrome.”

“I was making the best decision for me at the time,” he said. “It was about this debt and not thinking a random … prince is going to come save me and kill the dragon. We have to take the dragon down ourselves — the billionaire dragon.”

“If these other billionaires paid their fair shares [of taxes], I wouldn’t have had to drop out,” he said.{mosads}

Long entered Morehouse, an all-male historically black college in Atlanta, in 2015 and was reportedly on track to graduate this year. In 2017, as a sophomore, he left the school to avoid piling onto a $60,000 student debt bill. He now attends a community college in Oakland, Calif.

When he found out that Smith announced over the weekend that he’d pay off the student loan debt for class of 2019 graduates, Long took to Twitter to express his frustration.

“I left Morehouse class of 2019 to avoid debt and this billionaire just paid the graduating class’s debt off,” Long tweeted on Sunday. “Kill me.”

I left Morehouse class of 2019 to avoid debt and this billionaire just paid the graduating class’s debt off. Kill me. pic.twitter.com/ETsjLxxT2a

— Local Butch Queen ‍♂️ (@JustJordan54) May 19, 2019

Long has since started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to pay off his student loans.

“I was flourishing at Morehouse but I couldn’t bare putting my family deeper into debt with Morehouse’s $47,000 a year tuition & board,” Long wrote on the campaign, adding that he’s still “saddled with over $50,00 in student debt from Morehouse and no Morehouse degree.”

The campaign has a fundraising goal of $67,000. As of Tuesday afternoon, it had received seven donations totaling $245.