Belle Knox Loses Her Financial Aid

Faced with a staggering tuition bill and few scholarships and grants to close the gap between what she could pay and what her college demanded, Duke student Miriam Weeks became porn’s Belle Knox by necessity. Now, ironically, the money she’s made doing porn has disqualified her for what little financial aid she’d been getting.

To her credit, in a post for TIME, Weeks ties her struggles with paying for college into larger issues with the cost of students — the cripplingly ridiculous amounts of money they’re expected to spend for their education doesn’t even really benefit them and instead pays the exorbitant salaries of bureaucrats and exorbitant costs of sports stadiums.

It’s true that college is untenably expensive for many Americans. But then, Weeks gets Controversial and calls for students who Should Not Be Going To College (students who couldn’t get into Duke, for example) to stop it, and for the government to let private industry control who gets student loans so that elite schools are forced to lower tuition.

Government must stop the flow of money to schools in order to get tuition rates under control again. That means being honest about the fact that not every child should go to college. Only 59% of full-time, first-time undergraduate students who began their pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at a 4-year degree-granting institution graduate in four years. That also means making students who can’t afford tuition out of pocket find funding in the private market, where lenders are too judicious to lend someone $150,000 to get a BA in underwater basketweaving.

It’s a pretty thought, driving down the price of college tuition so people whose parents make some money, but not enough to pay for college, can actually hope to pay their loans off by 30. But judging by the capitalist pantsing Chicago residents are enduring after the city let a large corporate entity take over its previously publicly held parking meters, I can’t say I trust private industry to lower the cost of anything.