He’s an anarchist-pacifist, he told me after our chance meeting, but he calls himself Anarchopanda. You can find tributes from his fans on Facebook and a handful of videos of him on YouTube, hugging the riot cops dispatched to suppress the spontaneous marches that have surfaced every night since the bill’s passage.
In November 2011, after three years of study, Washington was provided notice by the "college" that she had reached the federal loan/grant aggregate limit of $52,340 and that it would cost $37,000 to complete the degree. Washington dropped out with $52,160 in debt. Because The Art Institute's credits are not transferable, Washington has been swindled out of $52,000 and three years of her life.
The only way to describe $89,000 for a four-year degree with non-transferable credits from a non-academic college is as a fraud and a swindle, and that characterization possibly fails to convey the frustration and downright victimization students like Washington must feel.
Like subprime mortgages, for-profit colleges are a scam driven by payment of commissions to sales staff known as recruiters. The payment of commissions to high-pressure salespeople is so central to the scam that the umbrella trade group for for-profits, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), has sued the federal government to overturn its ban on incentive pay.
Instead of you going off into the real world, we send you immediately into a debtor’s prison…And at 22 you are in prison. Because now you have $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 worth of STUDENT LOAN DEBT that you are going to spend the next 20-30 years paying off! Why would we do this to our children?!? We didn’t have that! Those of you who are in here that are my age and older, what did it cost us to go to school here in Michigan? Let me tell you how we paid- if you didn’t get a scholarship, the way you paid for Michigan State was you worked at Dairy Queen for the summer!
"This is not an endorsement for or against Ron Paul. He is just discussing some important issues about our plight, and it is well worth watching and considering. He is the only candidate from either party to really take this subject head-on in an open and honest way."
In the film “Network” the protagonist, Howard Beale’s makes a to arms: “First you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being goddammit-- my life has value!’ I want you to get up now, I want all of you to get up out of your chairs, go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’”
If you’re like me, you’re a twenty something who has gone to college in the USA, and are currently trying to pay thousands of dollars of student loans, have been in forbearance on multiple occasions, and have paid in interest the value of some of your loans multiple times over. You probably have floating around in your subconscious an unfocused notion that you and everybody you graduated with, everyone you work with, is getting swindled.
Default: The Student Loan Documentary draws on the stories of individuals like you, expert testimony, and simply runs the raw numbers to bring that unfocused notion into crystal clarity.
This film takes the elephant in the room that has been invisible right in front of our faces, and highlights it with neon orange spraypaint. YES you are getting swindled! YES our higher educational system is broken. YES the USA is becoming a debtors prison. YES it really was easier to get a college degree and a good paying job when your parents were your age. What’s more YES there is something you can do about it!
Just as Howard Beal’s call to arms rallied a nation, Default: The Student Loan Documentary has the potential to be a flashpoint for an entire generation to organize around. It is my hope that this film it will spawn a generation-wide economic justice movement.
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