A little old school Steve Austin. This is NOT a rally, obviously. It was an episode of RAW.
This is the Stone Cold Steve Austin shirt I thought of as I read this.
My mom has been telling me for years “you’ll get forgiven if you just work as a teacher for ten years!” and I’ve told her “I don’t believe that’s going to happen.” Now it is coming to pass, as I expected, that this arrangement is going to be fraught with “but we didn’t mean you” loopholes and other trickery. Or they’ll just cancel it. Apparently that’s fine now.
What less could we expect from this administration and the current GoP in general? Their record on education included No Child Left Behind — the brainchild that led to a generation of students who can’t believe in anything but an A and think that if they can write to a test and memorize a set of facts they smart, Secretary of Education DeVos who is a walking curse, the gutting of after school programs, the arts, school lunches, etc.
Education is under an assault. And even without the assault from the outside, academics and advanced students are under an assault from the inside as well as tenure lines dry up, graduate programs become more concerned with nurturing research than nurturing students, class caps skyrocket and colleges adopt corporate models.
I don’t really care if you liked Bernie Sanders or not. I did; I thought he was our best possible chance at fixing a number of problems. He wanted college to be free. And he wanted everyone to have healthcare. A number of people who think like me like to lecture people who supported Bernie for their lack of loyalty to Hillary (I did support Hillary after the nomination). But shame on all of you who sit by and watch as the Trump Administration breaks the backs of the future in the name of tax cuts and war.
This is ridiculous. If this is how the government is going to treat student loan debt, they need to at least include it in bankruptcy proceedings so that some of us who are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt can imagine a day that we can focus on paying for our other things. My wife and I, combined, owe around $250K in student loans (my mother owes $50K that will have to be discharged because she’s disabled). That’s double the price of our home. We could buy our house outright, everything in it, and each buy an expensive new car for the cost of our education. We cannot have a child because of the debt.
Meanwhile with tenure dwindling (I appear to be one of the chosen few who will have a chance at getting tenure eventually), jobs in education for the people with all this student debt, average $45K a year. It’s better than the poverty line, but by enough. Not enough to displace the debt. I lost 12 years of labor to my education while incurring all that debt. The reward of wanting to give back and be an educator is an almost impossible to bear load.
But the President gets two scoops of ice cream, so I guess it’s all fine, right?