About: The Cornell Daily Sun recently posted a piece penned by Barack Obama concerning student loans and his pending efforts to make education more affordable and accessible to young Americans. The comments section had unfortunately been hijacked by right-leaning posters, so as president of the Cornell Democrats I tried to put things in perspective. This post is discursive and very stream-of-thought, so please pardon my lack of eloquence.
Okay - so I just got finished watching this Republican presidential candidate debate, and here's what I came away with:
Newt Gingrich doesn't want me to stay in college any longer than I have to (which is rough, seeing as how I'm trying to get a Ph.D).
Newt Gingrich also thinks that I should have to work 20 hours a week as well as 40 during the summer.
Ron Paul doesn't think that I should get any money from the government - which is also rough, since I don't have parents (er, parent) that can afford to pay full sticker price for my undergrad education, let alone law school (if I went that route).
Newt Gingrich pointed out that at the College of the Ozarks, every student works 15 hours a week to pay for their room and board. That's all well and good, but that college only costs 1/3 of what Cornell costs. So to go to Cornell, per Newt Gingrich's logic, I would have to work 45 hours a week just to pay tuition, room, and board at a private university. That's sort of ridiculous. And if I were to go to a prestigious law school? Fuck me sideways with a lunchbox.
Also, a national program like that which Gingrich suggested would require the creation of around 10-15 million part-time and full-time jobs for those students - I find it hard to believe that such a system could actually be put into practice; seeing as how you could give those same hypothetical 10-15 million jobs to unemployed Americans. It's painfully amusing how pitifully shallow these Republican analogies/suggestions are.
Now some people are brilliant, and they can work 50+ hours a week and take 21 credits and still keep a 3.8. Well, I'm not one of those people; and chances are you aren't either. That doesn't mean that we're lazy, or that we're worthless, or that we're not capable of significantly contributing to society.
In a global economy, we're not just competing against our American peers for certain jobs, but also against our friends from abroad. So in order to be competitive, we have to receive educations that are either equal or superior to those of said peers. College is supposed to be the gateway towards upward economic mobility. I don't come from a rich family, but I'm a pretty smart fucker (or so I've been told), and student loans make it possible for me to attend the best school that I qualify for (i.e. Cornell, Yale, Dartmouth) instead of the best school I can afford (i.e. Texas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State).
The existence of that potential is what drove me and many of my fellow Cornellians to work so hard during their youth. If I knew that Texas was my ceiling regardless of my best efforts, then I probably wouldn't have tried nearly as hard.
Now, Republicans like to say that "college isn't for everyone", and you know what; maybe they're right - it might not be. But since you can't fucking DO anything without a college degree of some sort, everyone is trying to just get in somewhere, anywhere. You can't seriously blame people for wanting a better future for themselves. That's ridiculous.
Cornellians are no different. Hey man, Rutgers is mad cheap, so why didn't all you guys from Jersey go there instead of Cornell? The SUNY schools are reasonably priced compared to Cornell, why aren't you New Yorkers there?
Oh that's right - because where you go to college pretty much determines where you get a job/how much you'll make in your field. Sure, there's exceptions; but not really. I'll hold Harvard's graduating median income against Florida A&M's any day of the week.
So if you want fewer people in college, then shit; you have to invest in stuff like trade schools, skill training, shit like that. You can't just say "fewer people should go to college" and then say "well fuck you if you didn't go to college, you stupid plebe". That's obscene.
So student loans account for $1 trillion worth of debt. That's a lot. But hey, if you raised taxes on millionaires to...let's see...REAGAN-ERA LEVELS, then you could easily help to mitigate this burden on those seeking to enrich themselves and one day contribute to society.
"But that's class warfare!" you might say. Pray tell, if a Republican president were to take away access to student loans (which overwhelmingly benefit kids from lower class backgrounds as well as minorities) but then slash taxes for the wealthy across the board (which Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan AND Rick Perry's 20-20 plan both accomplish), what exactly would you call that?
Shit man, class warfare already happened. The rich fucking won. It was a fucking rout. The war's over, y'all. All we're asking is that the wealthy have the courtesy to lube us proles up with some Astroglide before they fuck us in the ass, and they're calling us greedy.
Occupy Wall Street didn't happen because the working class was all of a sudden getting fucked in the ass. The middle class was getting fucked in four dimensions back in '96, but people weren't protesting because they could see a brighter future in store. They felt as if their kids would live better lives. They felt assured that hard work and a little luck could give them a living wage and eventually a comfortable retirement. And if things didn't work out, or if they hit a hard spot, they had the government to provide the lube to make the assfucking they were getting at the time bearable.
But the problem now is that the Republicans want to keep on assfucking the proletariat, but with no lube (social programs) AND no protection (government regulation of the financial industry). And Americans are saying "Yo, rich people, we like you and all, keep on being rich, but we kind of don't want to get raw-dogged in the ass without lube". Is that really so much to ask?
Put it this way: if you take a girl (or a guy) home, they probably will ask you to use protection. When's the last time someone was like "NO. FUCK NO. That is a DEAL-BREAKER." Seriously? Why is it that we practice casual sex with more sense than we practice our politics and our economy? I think that's fucked up.
This is an incredibly vulgar analogy, but I think it's apropos.
The President of Cornell Republicans then mentioned that parents should "move college to the absolute top of the priority list instead of throwing money at luxuries their children don’t require", and I think that's somewhat crass and insensitive. I mean, I didn't require a GameCube for my 11th birthday. I was never required to play lacrosse in high school. I would say that eight years of private lessons for playing the saxophone were something of a luxury as well, in retrospect - unless you're buying your kid a Lamborghini Gallardo LP-570 Superleggera for his 16th birthday (which you could probably afford if you take the cost of a 20k/yr private school and a 50k/yr college); and I don't think anyone is doing that.
Just my two cents, y'all. Thanks for the time!