From the Hill: The increasing price we pay
The increasing price we pay
February 20, 2007
Kenji Skulstad
In the years before I came to Trinity Western University, I promised myself I would avoid student debt at all costs. This year I will break that promise.
In high school, I worked as much as possible and saved every dollar I could for my education. While this drive instilled the discipline necessary to achieve what I thought I needed, I have realized now that reaching that goal would cause me to shut down my dreams.
My aim in avoiding a student loan was to be free to pursue my interests after I graduated from university. I began to see, however, that this mentality ultimately forced me to lay aside my interests and not take advantage of opportunities that were available due to obligation and time constraints. The notion that we can forfeit our formative years and the experiences and aspirations they would allow, with the intention to pursue them later in life after things have “settled down,” is a fallacy.
So, with a desire to get the most out of my formative years, I will take out a student loan so that I can cope with the fact that tuition will rise 7.2 per cent next fall.
But as taking one opportunity means losing another, I am forced to ask whether the cost is worth the value. And TWU must ask itself what the impact is on not only the individual student, but on our world as well.
If TWU is truly training leaders of character through its curriculum and lifestyle expectations, why are heavier monetary burdens placed on us? It’s not a matter of whether or not students here and at other, cheaper universities graduate with a relatively similar amount of debt. Figures and statistics will not reveal the human impact. The average student’s chance to change the world is lost in the debt and the rush to raise mass capital.
What would the world look like if students could apply the creativity and resourcefulness they learned as students to the real world?
I asked this question after hearing George Elliot Clarke, a distinguished writer and professor at the University of Toronto, deliver a speech entitled “A Blueprint for the City of Justice” at the La Fontaine-Baldwin Symposium in Calgary.
His closing thoughts, interestingly, focused, on the student and their role in Canada’s civic future. His proposals ask the question, “What would society look like if student debt was dramatically reduced?”
Clarke envisions a world in which students are encouraged to “apply their intelligence, leisure, energy and idealism to the revolutionary transformation of the city’s look, feel, socio-economic relations and political structure.”
But as he points out, “such a vision requires, however, that student debt loads be dramatically decreased, thereby freeing students to continue to apply, on mass, the crucial task of imaginative agitation for social change.”
Clearly, there are far more implications involved with building student debt than first imagined. Taking a year off to pay down your loans, or choosing the ever-efficient and lucrative option of teaching English in Asia, puts an immediate sidestep in your ambitions.
If most people give up on the their dreams before turning 30, the average student has a maximum of eight years before they will settle into the dull routines of Western living. One year off from pursuing your goals turns into three, and three turn all too quickly into a car, a mortgage, and a baby.
I’m taking out a loan with the knowledge that I will be able to pursue my education and gain new experiences with a freedom that being a student should allow. While I can make myself believe that there may be new opportunities and lessons that will come with paying it back, I know that this new economic situation will only buy me two more years.
I will not let the vision for a world where we could apply our creative energies after graduation exist only in hope; I will fight for it while I still live in freedom.
Now you go...
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