Spring Break
The plight of the poor college student: floundering in an unfair society
BARRY FRANKLIN
Issue date: 8/27/07 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 1
In a country where lavish lifestyles dominate the headlines and new Hummers are bought everyday, we suffer.
The working class: the poor college students and we who serve those who make more than we do. We, the underbelly of upper middle class parents trying to give their kids a better life and we who seek to change the circumstance of our monetary existence.
It would be great to think about the university experience in the purely ideological sense of a place only for higher learning, but the sad truth is that money has everything to do with it. We are caught up in a capitalist system or game, trying to rise above the fray of every other college burnout, yet we are held back and held down at every turn by the very rules of the game.
Questions such as what are you going to do with yourself after college, pop up as soon as you say you’re going. If you had the good fortune of getting college paid for, then congratulations, but there are others out on campus who had to go into massive debt in order to be here.
What does it all mean? Another ideological question, how much should money play into the whole system. Just try to buy a house within the next year or so. Realtors everywhere would tell you that it is a buyer’s market. Just try to get an honest home for an honest price and see where that will take you. The process is long and treacherous, while faceless bankers look over your credit and find out if you are good enough to own some wood, plaster and electrical wire.
We need credit in order to buy a home, but we also need to spend money in order to get credit. Poor college students or working class people can scrape and save all they want, but if they have not had enough money to buy thousands of dollars worth of stuff before they get to the bank, their credit is not good enough. What if you go into debt thinking you will build your credit but get too far and find yourself living with your parents at age 30 just so you can climb out?
Renting is another story all together. Realty companies find old homes and convert them into small apartments. They pack as many students as possible into a space as little as possible and expect people to pay an inflated sum for location alone.
Renting is more affordable, but the people who are paying rent are paying that money to someone else who owns the home.
Someone else is making money off the place and building their own credit so they can make the next big step toward buying a jet. The money the poor college student makes just to break even ends up getting poured back into the system and often finds itself in the hands of a rich person.
Everyone needs insurance right? What if you are riding your bike to school one day, trying to save money on the outrageous gas prices and trying to save the environment a little bit of pain? As you are riding you get hit by a Ford F-250 and break some bones. The hospital is going to want to know if you have insurance even before they treat you. They will want to avoid a malpractice suit and the hospital needs to get paid.
The poor college student probably works in a customer-service job that pays the rent and bills and buys the occasional beer; they have no time to make the money needed for insurance, which means they are not taken care of. The dog-eat-dog mentality of the capitalist system we live in does not allow for people like us to have the insurance needed to mend our broken bones.
Then the bike rider finds him or herself out of work because they cannot function with their maladies. They cannot work to make the money and they cannot go to school to get out of the system and therefore they end up in a low paying job for the rest of their life saying they will make it back to college someday.
The poor college student is in school to plan for the future right? What about retirement? The Baby Boomer generation is going to take all the social security away from us anyway, so we need to think about investing in a 401 K and PERCY.
These are stocks that can go up or down depending on the market, and frankly, America is not the super power it used to be so the stock market may not be the best place to have money tied up. Yet, the money we pour into the stocks helps the economy grow, which helps our stocks grow in turn. But who is seeing the payoff on those dividends?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is privately owned. This means that someone out there is seeing all this profit lining his or her pockets based on our fear that we will someday be old, alone and penniless. The self-made man is a great story but I see the disparity in any moral capacity as too huge to ignore.
It is easy to sign off on our fellow human beings in this capitalist system. Hey, I worked my ass off to make this amount of money, why should I help you? The answer is because we are human we should help each other out. The moral obligation to living in a society should play a role in peoples’ thought processes as they invest their wealth in purely subjective places.
Perhaps instead of buying a boat, the guy down the street could pay a little more for a social health care system. Perhaps instead of buying that next property the couple in North Boise could pay a little extra for Medicare and Medicaid. It seems as if the only people who tip those in customer service jobs are the people who work in customer service jobs. They are not the richest people in the world and not the ones who should be tipping.
The system is wrong; it’s on its head. We can make enough money from winning the Powerball jackpot to buy Jennifer Aniston but we can’t make enough money after 20 years of working to buy a home.
Capitalism is not all evil but there should be a check and balance to wealth one group of people can have. There should be a moral obligation to our fellow human beings infused in the search for more funds to play with.
In the near future we might find America in a worse way than when we were born. Are the poor people in this nation going to be there to help us get out when all America has done is keep them poor?
The working class: the poor college students and we who serve those who make more than we do. We, the underbelly of upper middle class parents trying to give their kids a better life and we who seek to change the circumstance of our monetary existence.
It would be great to think about the university experience in the purely ideological sense of a place only for higher learning, but the sad truth is that money has everything to do with it. We are caught up in a capitalist system or game, trying to rise above the fray of every other college burnout, yet we are held back and held down at every turn by the very rules of the game.
Questions such as what are you going to do with yourself after college, pop up as soon as you say you’re going. If you had the good fortune of getting college paid for, then congratulations, but there are others out on campus who had to go into massive debt in order to be here.
What does it all mean? Another ideological question, how much should money play into the whole system. Just try to buy a house within the next year or so. Realtors everywhere would tell you that it is a buyer’s market. Just try to get an honest home for an honest price and see where that will take you. The process is long and treacherous, while faceless bankers look over your credit and find out if you are good enough to own some wood, plaster and electrical wire.
We need credit in order to buy a home, but we also need to spend money in order to get credit. Poor college students or working class people can scrape and save all they want, but if they have not had enough money to buy thousands of dollars worth of stuff before they get to the bank, their credit is not good enough. What if you go into debt thinking you will build your credit but get too far and find yourself living with your parents at age 30 just so you can climb out?
Renting is another story all together. Realty companies find old homes and convert them into small apartments. They pack as many students as possible into a space as little as possible and expect people to pay an inflated sum for location alone.
Renting is more affordable, but the people who are paying rent are paying that money to someone else who owns the home.
Someone else is making money off the place and building their own credit so they can make the next big step toward buying a jet. The money the poor college student makes just to break even ends up getting poured back into the system and often finds itself in the hands of a rich person.
Everyone needs insurance right? What if you are riding your bike to school one day, trying to save money on the outrageous gas prices and trying to save the environment a little bit of pain? As you are riding you get hit by a Ford F-250 and break some bones. The hospital is going to want to know if you have insurance even before they treat you. They will want to avoid a malpractice suit and the hospital needs to get paid.
The poor college student probably works in a customer-service job that pays the rent and bills and buys the occasional beer; they have no time to make the money needed for insurance, which means they are not taken care of. The dog-eat-dog mentality of the capitalist system we live in does not allow for people like us to have the insurance needed to mend our broken bones.
Then the bike rider finds him or herself out of work because they cannot function with their maladies. They cannot work to make the money and they cannot go to school to get out of the system and therefore they end up in a low paying job for the rest of their life saying they will make it back to college someday.
The poor college student is in school to plan for the future right? What about retirement? The Baby Boomer generation is going to take all the social security away from us anyway, so we need to think about investing in a 401 K and PERCY.
These are stocks that can go up or down depending on the market, and frankly, America is not the super power it used to be so the stock market may not be the best place to have money tied up. Yet, the money we pour into the stocks helps the economy grow, which helps our stocks grow in turn. But who is seeing the payoff on those dividends?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is privately owned. This means that someone out there is seeing all this profit lining his or her pockets based on our fear that we will someday be old, alone and penniless. The self-made man is a great story but I see the disparity in any moral capacity as too huge to ignore.
It is easy to sign off on our fellow human beings in this capitalist system. Hey, I worked my ass off to make this amount of money, why should I help you? The answer is because we are human we should help each other out. The moral obligation to living in a society should play a role in peoples’ thought processes as they invest their wealth in purely subjective places.
Perhaps instead of buying a boat, the guy down the street could pay a little more for a social health care system. Perhaps instead of buying that next property the couple in North Boise could pay a little extra for Medicare and Medicaid. It seems as if the only people who tip those in customer service jobs are the people who work in customer service jobs. They are not the richest people in the world and not the ones who should be tipping.
The system is wrong; it’s on its head. We can make enough money from winning the Powerball jackpot to buy Jennifer Aniston but we can’t make enough money after 20 years of working to buy a home.
Capitalism is not all evil but there should be a check and balance to wealth one group of people can have. There should be a moral obligation to our fellow human beings infused in the search for more funds to play with.
In the near future we might find America in a worse way than when we were born. Are the poor people in this nation going to be there to help us get out when all America has done is keep them poor?
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Burt Wats
posted 8/28/07 @ 6:01 PM EST
Geez, as a boomer hippie from the 60's, I am amazed nothing has changed in the college mind set over the last 40 years.
Mr. Franklin, here is how you "function" in a capitalist society:
1. (Continued…)
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