Assignment One Essay
The essay “Waking Up and Taking Charge” is an essay written by Anya Kamenetz regarding the financial issues facing today’s young college students. According to her, there are many unfair ways the financial systems within America’s universities, especially the most prestigious ones. Some of the problems explained in the essay are lack of education funding, fairer credit laws, design of the school-to-work system, justice system, worker protections, living wages, health care, saving programs, support for young families and homeowners and entitlement reform. Among all these though, the issue Kamenetz mainly focused on was student loans, and the cost of college. Kamenetz attended Yale, which is one of the most prestigious and most expensive colleges. After a few examples given, it’s clear that even at a prestigious college like that, students are demanding action to help themselves. Staging sit-in protests, organizing rallies, and petitioning the university. But Kamenetz explains that the real reason why despite these efforts, no big changes have been made yet. The reason is plenty of college students understand the problems facing them and want change but aren’t seeking change in effective ways. The protests and petitions are a nice start, but if students want to start seeing changes, they must start to organize together, and become a louder voice. In her essay Kamenetz gets into politics a bit, and her main solution is for students to form a PAC. Congress has the most control over the education system, and unless students make waves there, nothing will happen. PACs have proved to be an effective way to influence congressmen and women. A large organized group like a PAC has the strong influence on how citizens will vote, and dangle money in front of these same congress members. In the past, fear of having a large organized group call for people to not vote for a candidate, or threaten to withdraw a lot of funding, it has influenced how these elected officials act in office. The downside to this is that PACs are a controversial way to influence Congress. Kamenetz does not address the negative, but from her argument this is her biggest solution.
My opinion on her argument presented in the essay is that she is completely right. I also believe Kamenetz has done a decent job at presenting her argument, and the essay will certainly sway some. The issue that I have with her argument, regardless that I believe her, is that she provides no rebuttal or counterclaim to her argument. Those with doubts about her argument have no response from her on why those doubts aren’t accurate or unnecessary. I’m aware of the problems college students face, and especially the complaints from these that are graduating. But with all of these students with these problems and nothing being done about it, it’s going to take something drastic. I like the PAC idea very much, and am not concerned with the counterarguments about how controversial the idea is. I am for change, and without a loud unified voice nothing is going to happen. PACs also require a lot of money to operate, but I am not concerned with this either. The list of people that want to see change is exponentially long, and even if money is an issue, PACs are influential regardless. If all of these small groups and people starting petitions rally around a national movement, it’s going to attract headlines. If a large PAC sends out a list of those not to vote for, people will listen. Helping students with a financial crisis is not a hard cause to get plenty of people to rally around.
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