I spent the summer after my freshman year in college lying face down on the couch. In one hand I held the remote control, in the other hand a cocktail of lemon juice and cayenne pepper. Beyonce liked this drink for weight loss; I was just a masochist. I painted my nails a deep red, like spilt blood, and repainted them until they became an obsidian black. I regretfully watched television shows about weight loss competitions and famous families, even Dane Cook stand-up at four in the morning, and listened to thunderstorms rise to the crescendos of my dog’s scared whining. I toyed contemptuously, as my cheek comfortably welded itself to the leather of my father’s most adored couch, with the idea of dropping out of higher education. ‘It’s just not for me,’ I thought to myself over and over again, while turning alternatives over in my brain of how my life could run a separate course. I could consider moving to Mexico as an aid worker, moving to Africa as an Aid worker, or moving into my parents’ house (not as an aid worker). I could also move on to a low paying job which lacked, what I had always deemed, “real significance”, a term I now understand to be as meaningless as it is elitist and derogatory. I understood, at the time, that the significance of a career could only come from large-scale achievement and wealth; if I had been dreaming big all of my life, I must also be able to achieve as such when the opportunity arose. To say that these “small” jobs were meaningless was to degrade the lives of millions of people across the world. Some of whom who had lived without access to the same privilege that I had been born into by sheer “happenstance”. My elitist mindset, which I still work to break down is likely the most shameful part of my summer. My last option, spending the rest of the year lying face down on the weathered leather of that brown couch, appealed to me most. I led myself into the most important question I had considered until that point, if college was not for me, then who was it for? After all, I had grown in a culture of academics, and had known since I was five years old what my parents did with their lives. My father unloaded a trunk full of binders and accordion folders full of work, every night around six o’clock, and around ten o’clock he fell asleep to the History Channel. In between, he laid on the aforementioned couch, and read what met his fancy for the evening. He adjusted horn-rimmed glasses over the bridge in the nose that I inherited from him, and considered the state of the union over coffee in the morning, came to my soccer games with a newspaper, and used to quiz me on spelling in car rides with nothing else to do. My mother worked three jobs when I was younger, not because we needed the money, but because being lucky as I was, and am, having parents busy themselves with intellectual pursuits allowed my life and my siblings’ lives to be more deeply and widely enriched. Tina, as I often refer to her, passed on to me a love for art history, gave me the Barron’s Book of Top 300 American Colleges as a bedtime story, and diagramed our solar system for me when I believed I would be a future space traveller. Luckily for me, in this context, my parents taught me that there would never be a question too big to fathom if I kept my palms open wide enough to grasp the world in their veiny templates. As I look back, I surely feel inside of myself the resulting combination of high academic standards, the imprint of my parents’ work ethic, the money that they painstakingly earned, and my childhood adoration of literature. Only after freshman year had come and gone did I acknowledge a loss in identity. The creation of my intellect as a commodity impressed on me the sale of my potential, and my cynicism all but consumed me. I had been silly to think I had been accepted into this world for the person I was, not the privilege I had been afforded by circumstance. All I wanted was a way out. The truth of our system, in the United States, is that no information given to students during their four years is individual. Harvard teaches the same material as the University of Massachusetts. Moreover, all one needs to do, if purely educating oneself is the goal, is to drown their intellectual shortcomings in a library card. Despite this, we are all perversely proud of our universities, whether or not we got there through privileged circumstance, or through what some may refer to as one’s “bootstraps”. We buy purple products with our logo, adopt the feeling of artistic college students down on our luck, and joke that this time of poverty and food insecurity is going to be the last of fun we endure before the crushing loans and lack of job availability combine to turn the diamonds of our dreams back into blackened coals. College, I determined forcefully, should not be a social mandate, but since it is, it should be affordable for all. John Sexton, a man we all adore at this campus, pays less than one percent on his NYU subsidized loan for his Fire Island vacation home. The two-hundred thousand dollars expected of any eighteen year old, upon enrolling in NYU, combines to form a university wide debt of almost seven-hundred million dollars. While President Sexton and other higher ranking administration enjoy almost no interest and high debt forgiveness on their NYU subsidized loans, the normally unforgivable, and non transferable student debt owned by NYU students will incur interest rates that rest comfortably between 4-10%. The corruption surrounding NYU student debt is not hidden. One example of this is on the list of preferred lenders to NYU students - people whom would not be allowed to rent a car on their own, but can, by legal standards, take out high risk loans - includes Citibank. Its position on this list is a conflict of interests; Martin Lipton, head of the board of trustees, represented Citigroup’s Chairman and CEO, Sanford Weill back in 1999 as they worked on overturning the Glass Steagall Act, which ensured that commercial banks, like Citi, could not merge with firms engaging in underwriting and investment banking. Nine years later, I was in eighth grade when my future as an academian became opaque, and vague when the 2008 housing bubble burst. The opportunity for education is a human right. Ideally, we should pursue higher levels of education for the improvements that education makes in the lives of those whom it touches. I should believe this, though, simply because my parents afforded me a luxurious inclusion into this world. Others should not feel excluded from the same system simply because of circumstance. Only in terms of public education, is it easiest to restructure the current federal budget for higher education. The implementation of this option would not look like a French system, nor would it appear Spanish in its application. By creating the bachillerato, or the baccalaureate these specific cultures acknowledge, like the U.S., that rank must come before accessibility. The problem in these respective systems is that different socio-economic stratas have access to different advantages and are disadvantaged in opposite ways. This issue is similarly reflected in the U.S. today. A child in a rural pueblo does not receive the same quality of education, or quantity of resources, that a private school attendee in Madrid receives. This fact alone makes it less likely that poorer students will find their way into the systems of collegiate, higher education. Even though in France, and in Spain, they are paid for in bulk, accessibility is diminished by state capacity and by circumstantial advantage. Heavily subsidized tuition at public universities is possible, however, as a goal for the federal government. The Atlantic ran an article “How Washington Could Make College Tuition Free (Without Spending a Dollar More on Education)” by Jordan Weissman, which detailed how the United States government spends 77 billion USD on tuition and endowments yearly, when the bill for public education came to be 60 billion USD. If about 75% of American undergraduates attend public institutions, would it not be better, in this case, to drastically reduce aid to private colleges, who have a right to charge what they will regardless of government subsidies, in order to educate the larger portion of the country? No student should be forced to compromise between a love for academics and education, the need for cash, and their academic standards. To invest in public education is to invest in opportunity and would allow for increased social mobility. Furthermore, isn’t that the backbone of the American Dream? I am so infinitely, and unfortunately, proud to love the idea that New York University could stand for, namely a university committed to excellence, before elitism. Among the world’s most prestigious universities, NYU has one of the highest acceptance rates allowing students from different cultures the opportunity to achieve social mobility through education. Although, I wonder if this is not but a thin mirage shrouding the truth that, as students, we spin the barrel of a two-hundred thousand dollar revolver and hope that it doesn’t shoot at our two-hundred thousand dollar heads. This article was written by Natalie Soloperto. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Tirza Alberta