In this morning’s New York Times, they ran a story on Steve Stanzak, an NYU Creative Writing student who claims to have been living in a subbasement of the library because he couldn’t afford university dorm housing, much less an apartment in New York. I believe it. When I was looking into grad programs at NYU, even university housing ran over a thousand dollars a month.
This is yet another demonstration that America is failing its students. It’s one thing to deny a student to a university due to his academics not being a good fit – if you don’t have the grades to get into the Ivy League, it’s too bad, but you had control over that – but if you just don’t have the cash, that’s where the government should step in. And not just to the tune of a federal loan, either. I’m talking reasonably deciding what the person needs. The government needs to do the math to calculate what a realistic living expense is for those conditions and then step up. A student should be able to enroll in the best school they are able to be accepted into, regardless of financial status. That’s how, as a country, we defeat international competitors like Japan. Our “education president” needs to put his money where his mouth is. At the moment, he’s going down in history as the president who gave the finger to the United Nations and hauled our country into a second Vietnam in order to look good for daddy.
Argh.
I wonder if Mr. Stanzak would have had this same problem if he’d been a math major, or an engineering major, instead of doing a “fluffy” major like creative writing. Or, for that matter, if he’d been African-American. Or even a woman. Instead, he’s a white male from a divorced family somewhere, and his only “minority” spin is that he’s gay, which, of course, under this administration wins you zero points.
Of course, there is some speculation as to whether or not Mr. Stanzak’s story is actually true. Check out the story and decide for yourself: This entry was written by geoffreylong, posted on at 8:54 am, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.