If you have to borrow to learn —
borrow to earn,
then tomorrow’s your turn
to pay for the knowledge
that should’ve been free.
If you’d rather be blissfully wrong
that hope is all gone,
then don’t lead me on
or make me believe
that you’d envy me.
A head full of facts
won’t help me relax
about paying it back,
so grant me reprieve
and just let me be.
Garbage Notes:
Short poem today. But I think it’s a topic many people can relate to. To be a student is to have a desire to learn. And a quality education isn’t something that should come with a life-crippling price tag.
Many people I know who are now working adults have had their wallets dented because of school. I mean come on—school. The thing you need in order to be a thriving working adult in the first place.
Maybe your loan wasn’t even for the purpose of tuition itself, but for other necessary things like room and board or extra funds to pay rent or living expenses because your school was in a city you couldn’t necessarily afford to live in with the salary of a working student.
Anyway, I won’t go too much into the controversy. Nor will I regale you with my own personal sob stories. The poem here is short for a reason. It’s because it should be so crystal fucking clear to humanity that the capacity, the opportunity, the pleasure to learn and expand our minds—without burden or worry or stress or the fear of future economic repercussions—should be something closer to a natural right.
I think it’s kind of wrong to sucker young kids who have barely learned anything about how to manage their finances into borrowing huge amounts of money at a time in their lives when they don’t even have a concept for what it would mean to pay that kind of sum back in the real world.
My only hope is that this problem becomes one of those things our society looks back on in the future and feels embarrassed about. Like how on earth could we do this?
A good well-balanced education should be accessible to those who want it, regardless of whether they can afford it. The current way will only cause people to resent the idea of learning itself and regret having tried to scale the otherwise worthwhile mountain of higher learning in the first place.
Franco Amati 2023
Yes, yes and yes because either way : (a) you’re going to pay and (b) as my Dad would say, “because bought sense is better than told, pay for education or pay the price.” I love this, thank you!
Yes i defenitly agree. You get these rich entitled kids who have no interest whatsoever in going to university or collage but their parents pay for them to go and waste...WASTE!! The opportunity. Then you get the poorest of poor kids who actually want to study and who could benefit most from getting a higher education and break the cycle of poverty who cannot afford the tuition cost because they have to go work when they finish school-if they even get the chance to finish- just to survive.
I live in South Africa where we dont have comunity collage, we dont have free education (unless you fall under the category of "the previously disadvantaged" and even then its only limited to highschool)
Tertiary education is so far out of reach of the poorer working class never mind the poverty stricken people that it is virtually impossible for them to attend.
So yes, i believe that higher education should be freely accessible to those who actually want to learn and who are willing to put the work in to learn and get the degree then to reap the rewards that they have earned through lots of hard work!!