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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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U of Money
Tuesday 30 December @ 18:34:38 |
 The divide between rich & poor has never been greater at the U
by Julia Curran
Money is poised to be the mot du jour of the University of Minnesota this school year. Donations to the U are up, wages of clerical workers are down, and tuition keeps rising like gas under water. For many of us undergraduates, employment (or lack thereof), student loans, increasing healthcare, tuition, and living costs, graduate school application and GRE fees, and our dwindling or nonexistent savings are troubling.
We’ve listened to the endless Gopher’s football stadium debate (do we build it or don’t we? who pays for it? what’s it worth?) and walked with or past the striking clerical workers during their chilly two weeks on the picket line. We’ve heard Greenspan’s economic reports and watched our friends accumulate more debt for school than Hollywood fashionistas pay for a dozen pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes and a couple of vintage Versace dresses. We’re aware that President Bush says the economy is improving even as the recently matriculated among us work at the Mall of America for minimum wage.
But not all students share this tale of worry, debt and Saturday nights spent working (if you’re lucky) or doing homework (if you’re not) because movies and restaurants are too expensive. The Campus Connector shuttles between Minneapolis and St. Paul like a child of divorced parents and on the twenty-minute ride people whip out cell phones, homework and bored expressions to pass the time. Not long ago I sat in front of a girl chatting on a phone, her perky voice distracting me from an article on modern discourses in Cosmo.
She may have mentioned the guy she liked in her sociology class, her final paper due Wednesday which she hadn’t started, or the way Mackenzie was, like, throwing herself at Justin. If she did, however, it was lost on me. My mind was trying to curl itself around her mention of the $600 that her parents send her every fortnight for incidentals. That’s $300 weekly, $45 daily, or more than minimum wage if she were working a full time job, which she’s not.
Bling-Bling @ the U
The amount of money she receives every two weeks would rent an apartment for a month. It could cover my University mandated health insurance. It’s enough to provide daily AIDS drugs for twenty people in Africa.
This is not to say I’m bitter; I’m sure that choosing between buying my medicine and going to see “Love Actually” (with Colin Firth, no less) teaches me the intricacies of decision-making, a valuable lesson. I enjoy counting out pennies to pay for photocopies. And tuition hikes give me something to talk about with total strangers, bridging the chasms of fashion and politics.
What does upset me, however, is that she isn’t unique. The U of M is a public institution, the college that we expect to be accessible to even the poorest among us and yet the halls of Folwell and Blegen, Willey and Lind are filled with affluent students whose parents are covering whatever the taxpayers haven’t already paid. Wandering in and out of classes and parties with equal apathy, these students wile away the obligatory time in college as if it’s an annoying rite of passage. Their sense of entitlement makes them blind to the realities of life for the striking clerical workers, overworked teaching assistants, and stressed and penny-pinching classmates. They have shallow dreams and Mom and Dad have deep pockets to finance them. Meanwhile the profound dreams, the I-have-a-dream dreams, are shunted aside.
These dreams were the ones I heard daily working as an English tutor for recent immigrant and refugee high school students. In between reading and writing they shared with me their goals of heading back to the refugee camp as a doctor, rebuilding Somalia’s political system, or advocating for the local Latino community. If dreams were dollars, these students would put President Bruininks to shame. Unfortunately an accessible public university in Minnesota is an idea akin to love at first sight, a suitably nostalgic notion harshly rejected by Real Life.
Real Life doesn’t always allow uninterrupted schooling eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year for thirteen years. A friend of mine in high school often missed classes to act as translator for her mother and grandparents at doctor’s appointments, the government center, the grocery store. Another friend went to school Monday to Thursday just as I did, but worked all day Friday to Sunday to earn money to send to her family in the Somali refugee camp. As a tutor, I watched Latino students stream out of school while I was setting up my tables for after-school tutoring because they had to go straight to their jobs to support themselves and their families. These circumstances aren’t taken into account when calculating GPA, and these responsibilities don’t end with a college acceptance letter.
Somali refugees are the lucky ones; Mukhtar Gaaddasaar, president of the Somali Student Association (SSA) at the U of M, says, “Somali students enjoy having all the privileges that every legal Minnesota resident has” including instate tuition, eligibility for financial aid, and the ability to work legally both on and off campus. It certainly seems to be an investment that’s paid off for Little Mogadishu (a.k.a. Minneapolis). At semester-end festivities last month I spoke with Yasin Garad, the SSA’s representative to the Minnesota Somali Student Union. Between quiz questions, skits on sending money home, and a lecture on Somali refugee camps from the Dutch anthropologist Cindy Horst, we discussed the changing fates of Somalis in Minnesota.
With Somali students now enrolled at every college around the state and numbers jumping dramatically each year, the SSA, formed in 1999, makes sense. To someone who’s attempted to start a student group herself, the group’s story sounds like a fairytale. In four years it’s managed to become the cornerstone of both statewide and North American groups of Somali college students. Its members organize social events and outreach programs to help Somali high school students navigate the college application process, and volunteer as tutors and teachers within the Somali community. These aren’t panaceas for the many challenges Somali students face but they certainly help.
The immigrant Latino community stands in stark contrast. The term Latino itself is hopelessly broad; it encompasses those whose families have lived in the United States since California was still a part of Mexico as well as those undocumented immigrants who crossed the border 15 years ago in their parents’ arms. Yet its expansive meaning makes the picture of Latinos at the U all the more dismal; of the almost 29,000 undergraduates, fewer than a 1,000 self-identify as Latino. According to a Latina at the U who spoke under the condition of anonymity, even those Latinos who attend college face many barriers. They are less likely to have family and friends who can help them navigate college application processes, they face discrimination and stereotypes, they often are the breadwinners for their families and must balance work and study, and the isolation they feel can be disheartening. Despite this, these students “are very involved with the [local Latino] community by mentoring, tutoring or volunteering in community settings.”
Many U student not only school full-time, but also work full-time
Yet these views of Somali and Latino students are of the ones who have made it to college. Despite the cohesive Somali community, young adults hoping to attend college still have many hurdles to jump.
They’ve switched schools more often than Limbaugh switches painkillers, each change often entailing a new language, culture, climate and set of expectations. They’ve worked not only to send money to relatives in the refugee camps, but to carve out a niche for the family that is here. The labyrinth that is the U.S. college application process is nothing more than another hurdle in the obstacle course of their education. According to Mukhtar Gaaddasaar, “many Somali students are working hard to support their family back home and pay their bills and tuition at the same time.
Therefore, they lose the eligibility of financial aid, which forces them eventually to discard their dream of attending college.” Not all those who start the race finish it; the University is set on having a homogenous cohort of 18-year-old freshmen who live on campus and attend school full-time. Students with familial responsibilities and financial troubles are left to fend for themselves.
For Latino immigrants, however, even applying to college can seem more like the barbed fence around the stadium than a surmountable obstacle. The Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility (IRIR) Act of 1996 essentially forced states to charge all undocumented immigrants out of state tuition, no matter how long they may have been a part of the local community. This means that the young man whose parents came to Minnesota as (illegal) migrant workers when he was still in diapers, and who has lived his entire life in Minnesota, would be forced to pay more than $18,000 in tuition. And believe you me, the $7,000 instate tuition is hard enough to cover.
The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (with the apt acronym DREAM) is a bipartisan bill to repeal a section of the IRIR Act in order to allow residents of states, not just citizens, to receive instate tuition. Minnesota’s not doing badly in supporting this bill and its sister bill in the House; both our senators and two representatives (Betty McCollum and Martin Sabo) are among the 158 federal legislative co-sponsors. Dayton even went so far as to issue a press release, saying that he fears barriers such as out of state tuition serve to “disqualify [talented young people] from the American dream.”
But whose dream are these students supposed to dream? John Champe of the anthropology department at the U of M suggests that neoliberalists are using college as collateral for enforcing a bland brand of the cultural “melting pot.” The debates between clerical workers’ supporters and University administrators show a disconnect between notions of what a public university is, who it is supposed to benefit, and how it will accomplish this. University administrators argued that the U of M is an entity driven by the free market. It must, as Champe dryly puts it, “if not reap a profit, at least break even.” The ideal college student is, coincidentally, the ideal capitalist labor. She does not take her labor potential with her when she leaves the United States to work in refugee camps in Kenya.
He does not upset the oiled machine by organizing undocumented hotel workers into unions. They are not writing poetry about political turmoil in Somalia or their cousins still in Vietnam or the way the air smells in Ecuador. They dream the American dream: SUVs in the garage, a 9-5 job in a corner office, summer’s mowed lawn and fall’s new wardrobe.
Maybe there’s room for this version of the American dream. But tuition has increased over 100 percent in 10 years; in four years it’s gone from $5,200 to $7,300 a year for residents and from $13,400 to $18,400 for out of state. When the decision must be made as to whom our dwindling tax dollars will subsidize, why would we choose to support the privileged children of privileged parents who will get a college education regardless? Our sympathies should lie with the students who dream big, the ones for whom college is not a four-year ritual of young adulthood, but a four-year baptism of fire in becoming catalysts for those grand dreams of a better world.
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