A Controversial Royal Engagement

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will be married in May. And both sides of the Atlantic have something to say about the royal engagement.

Some are thrilled. Others are appalled. Regardless of where you lie on the spectrum, one thing is undeniable: Markle isn’t your prince’s typical fiancé. She’s older than Harry, biracial, divorced, American, and an actress.

She will be the first woman of color to join the British Family. And many believe that this fact reveals England’s quiet—but very much pervasive—racism. “I think a lot of people think we’re in a post-racial society but it certainly doesn’t feel that way for the black and brown people living here,” said Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, deputy editor of gal-dem. “Racism is still alive and cooking here.”

Only 3% of the British population identified themselves as black in the 2011 census. The point: the African American community remains a minority in England. So what does it mean for a biracial woman to be a part of British royalty?

Although it is a step in the right direction for Harry to have chosen Markle, it does not mean that everything is suddenly perfect. As Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, put it, “Being chosen by a prince is not democracy.” This does not equate with the end of racial injustice and prejudice.

England’s racial issues will not be remedied by one royal engagement. At the same time, however, it feels as though more controversial topics are being put on the forefront of people’s minds, and, for that, we can thank Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

 

Could Overpopulation Ever Be a Good Thing?

For my philosophy class, we were prompted to consider whether overpopulation could ever be a good thing. My response was immediate: no. After thinking about it, however, I saw some advantages to overpopulation.

PRO:

The definition of the term “overpopulation” describes the issue at hand: when the human population exceeds the carrying capacity of Earth. If a certain room had a carrying capacity of 250 people, but there were 400 people in the room, then there would be chaos; the same is true of Earth.

Overpopulation results in a number of consequences. The number of resources becomes scarce when there are too many people in a certain area; as a result of competition for resources, acts of violence and aggressive incidents may increase.  Overpopulation also has a direct negative effect on the environment; when a city is overpopulated, for example, the number vehicles used increases and the rise in the amount of C02 does, too. The rise in the amount of C02 emissions acts as a contributing factor to global warming. An increase in the number of people also means fighting for jobs, causing a snowball effect of unemployment and poverty. Growth in the world population can also lead to the spread of diseases and epidemics; think about it, when you are in a crowded area, your chances of catching an individual’s illness is much higher than it would be if you were not t in a crowded area.

All of these effects can be seen in overpopulated countries, such as India, China and Nigeria. Each of these countries has high poverty, unemployment, and crime rates, in addition to scarcity in resources and poor air pollution. In order to avoid all of the consequences mentioned above—in addition to a number of detrimental effects that were not listed—further steps should be taken to prevent overpopulation.

CON:

Every human has the right to live, and, therefore, steps should not be taken to prevent human lives from coming into existence. Take the Chinese one-child policy, as an example of how detrimental it is to limit humans to producing offspring. Although this policy was introduced to control the country’s overpopulation problem, it was a violation of a basic human right to have children. In addition, families often traveled to other countries to give birth to their children and would then return to China. Furthermore, this lead to the 4-2-1 problem where one child was responsible for his two parents and four grandparents. The point: restricting people from having as many children as they want can be hazardous to a society.

An advantage of having more people on Earth means the possibility of societal growth. We live in the technology age, with information readily accessible to us; now more than ever before, anyone is capable of taking advantage of knowledge. If we were to constrict the number of people on this planet, we would be constricting the possibility of new inventions and technologies. As the population grows, so does the possibility of urbanization and economic and intellectual development. Having more people on this planet means more innovation and the collaboration amongst humans to work towards a better Earth.

 

FAFSA: Fundamentally Flawed and Undoubtedly Unhelpful

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for the 2018-2019 academic year became live on October 1. We all know what that means: the college application season is upon us. And it is causing millions of students and their families to brace themselves for increasingly small acceptance rates, high tuition costs, and difficult dinner table conversations.

But the FAFSA is intended to alleviate—not exacerbate —the financial burdens of postsecondary schools, right?

Right.

The intention of the FAFSA may be to provide access to college. But, reality check: it acts as more of a hindrance than an advantage to applicants across the country because it is confusing to fill out, does not direct its resources to families who need the most help, and oftentimes leaves people with thousands of dollars in student loan debt.

Take the hardworking student of David Nguyen. In 2015, David was accepted to his top choice, Tufts University. He earned a 3.9 GPA and scored a 30 on the ACT; he deserved the “congratulations!” letter. David had to rescind his application to Tufts, however, and will graduate from his in-state school of the University of Michigan in 2019.

“Well, why did David decline his offer from Tufts if it was his dream school?” you may ask.

Even with an annual household income of $130,000, David’s family could not afford to pay over $60,000 a year for one child’s education. So, he filled out what should be his ticket to college: the FAFSA.

The formula the FAFSA uses (cost of attendance – expected family contribution = financial aid) determined that David was only eligible for $10,000 in financial aid, leaving his family responsible for the remaining $50,000. He weighed his options of graduating from Tufts with student loan debt or leaving the University of Michigan debt-free, and he—reluctantly but understandably—chose the latter option.

The unfortunate, discouraging reality is that David’s situation is not an unusual one; instead, it has become the norm. According to the Institute for Higher Education Policy, families with annual incomes of $100,000 cannot afford almost 60% of U.S. colleges and universities.

But let’s not that the median U.S. household income in 2016 was $57,617—way below that $100,000 benchmark. This means that the majority of higher education institutions are totally out of reach for the average American family, and, as a result, for the average American student.

The problem, however, is that as colleges have become so financially unattainable, they have also become the prerequisite for a stable career. In short, there is statistic likelihood that a bachelor’s degree—at the very least—means making more money. The Pew Research Center found that Millennials with college degrees earned $17,500 more a year than their high school graduate counterparts.

So, the pressure is on to go to college to earn more money. Which is why—amongst several other reasons—people go to such great lengths to avoid the obstacle of affordability.

Loans should be the perfect solution. Don’t currently have the money to pay for school? No problem. You enroll in a direct subsidized or unsubsidized loan program. Things are looking great—until you graduate college with over $37,000 in debt. And you’re not alone. You’re only one of the 44 million people in student loan debt.

All of this can be attributed to the immaculate FAFSA.

Now more than ever before, students are either being deterred from attending their dream schools solely because of the price tag attached to higher education, or they are graduating from these institutions in thousands of dollars of debt. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Nevertheless, the number of students enrolling in postsecondary schools is increasing. People want to go to college. In 2015 alone, 17 million were enrolled. That number is projected to increase to 19.3 million by 2026.

The point? The FAFSA needs to undergo dramatic changes to accommodate the skyrocketing number of people who want to receive an education after high school.

First of all, the FAFSA needs to be simplified. Rather than mimicking a lengthy tax form, the language used should be straightforward and easy to understand. Secondly, the FAFSA needs to reevaluate the formula it uses to factor in other variables, such as the number of children a family has. In addition, the Pell Grant needs to be increased to at least $12,000. Finally, the current student loan debt program needs to be terminated; instead, the FAFSA should only offer one student loan option with no fees and a low interest rate that must be paid off throughout a student’s college career.

Works Cited

http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/11/pf/college/college-financial-aid/index.html

http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/22/pf/college/afford-college/index.html

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income-gap-between-young-college-and-high-school-grads-widens

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cha.asp

What “student-athlete” really means

We often refer to people who play sports for universities as “student-athletes.” Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA, coined the term as a response to Ray Dennison’s death. An on-field collision for the Fort Lewis College football team was the culprit. Dennison’s wife filed for workers’ compensation death benefits, but she was denied these benefits under the justification that her husband was a “student-athlete,” not a college employee.

Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, shed light on this topic: “The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the ‘student-athlete’ lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its ‘fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.’”

Branch points out how the term has been carefully crafted, with the calculated purpose of depicting college sports players as amateurs. The pairing of “student” and “athlete” into one phrase, however, allowed for ambiguity when convenient for the university. If a student could not attend a certain class due to a sports-related commitment, he would not be penalized because he was an athlete. At the same time, though, that same student would not be paid because he was merely a student in college.

The moral of the story: the term “student-athlete” does nothing to protect the people it’s labeling. It is allowing universities to exploit their players, profit off of their talents, and dispose of them when they can no longer generate revenue.

So, the first question isn’t, “should student-athletes be paid?” Instead, it should be “how do we define people who play sports for universities?” Rather then identifying them as student-athletes, I believe we need to characterize them as employees of the universities they play for.

I doubt that anyone would argue workers should not be compensated for their work, so the same would remain true for this particular case. Therefore, under this logic, college-aged athletes would be paid—just as every other employee would.

Works Cited

https://www.insidenu.com/2014/1/28/5355988/ncaa-student-athlete-kain-colter-union-workers-comp

http://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/10/24/ncaa-amateurism-bill-littlefield

http://college.usatoday.com/2016/10/20/should-athletes-be-paid-to-play/