I think that’s it, everything I know. I wish I had shoe-horned in what E.L. Doctorow said about writing: “It’s like driving at night with the headlights on. You can only see a little ways ahead of you, but you can make the whole journey that way.” I love that, because it’s true about everything we try. I wish I had slipped in what Ram Dass said, that when all is said and done, we’re just all walking each other home. Oh, well, another time. God bless you all good.
Tippen says she was fired by her boss, hotel manager Herry Patel. Earlier that day, Patel had called the Post to express frustration that he had been quoted giving his opinion about the minimum wage hike. (He objected to it.)
It was soon after, Tippen says, that Patel found her in the lobby and fired her.
“He said I was stupid and dumb for talking to [the Post],” Tippen said. “He cussed me and asked me why you wrote the article. I said, ‘Because he’s a reporter; that’s what he does.’ He said, ‘it was wrong for me to talk to you.’”
A man who sounded like Patel, reached recently at the Days Inn, declined to comment in several separate phone calls. On one call, the man said he’d never met Herry Patel and did not know who he was. On another call, he threatened to call the police if “you keep bothering us.”
Tippen was uncertain whether she wanted to publicly share the story of her firing, but she decided to because she feels increasingly desperate. She lived paycheck-to-paycheck during her two-plus years at the Days Inn, and now, she and her family are living off a recent tax refund check that won’t last past March. Tippen says she’s looking for another job but hasn’t found one yet.
Despite Patel’s indignation over Tippen’s interview, Harlan reports that Patel — who opposed Arkansas’ minimum wage increase — had suggested that he speak with Tippen for his original story. But after Harlan says he “spent additional time with Tippen,” learning what life on the minimum wage was like, Patel threatened a lawsuit if Harlan published the story.
The irony: Harlan reports that Tippen had nary a cross word to say about her boss. But Patel couldn’t abide a story that laid bare the challenges confronted by those who live on the economic margins. In retaliation, he pushed Tippen further toward the edge.
The ultimate solution in the private edu-debt sphere emerged recently when conservative ex-governor of Indiana, now president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels proposed to the U.S. Congress that, “Instead of taking out a traditional college loan, students would have the option of finding an investor – possibly a Purdue alum – to finance their degree in exchange for a share of their future income.”
Daniels is not the only proponent of these arrangements. According to the reporter, Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former House Rep. Tom Petri from Wisconsin introduced legislation last year to help create the legal framework for these kinds of schemes. The bills did not advance.
But like what so often happens, quirky proposals from conservatives that appear like blips on the outer edge of the crazy radar, actually have a huge think tank machinery behind them. As a report from an Indiana news outlet explains, the financial vehicles Daniels alluded to are what’s known in the biz as Income Share Arrangements (ISAs). The reporter sourced the concept of ISAs to 1955 and University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, the god of right-wing privatization advocates.
Beth Akers, a fellow with centrist think tank Brookings, has argued ISAs should “play a role” in financing student loan debt. She posits that the central problem with higher education is there is “almost no incentive” for students to choose schools and courses of study that pay off down the road in terms of lucrative salaries. A broad market for ISAs could change that by enabling students to “collateralize their financing with future earnings, just as home buyers collateralize their mortgage with the house itself.”
“Income share agreements … are quietly gaining a following among critics of the nation’s staggering student-debt problem,” Slate’s Alison Griswold observes. “New companies such as Upstart, Pave, and Lumni have turned to the investing-in-people model.”
Griswold points to a study from the conservative American Enterprise Institute which argues, “Because ISA investors earn a profit only when a student is successful, they offer students better terms for programs that are expected to be of high value and have strong incentives to support students both during school and after graduation. This process gives students strong signals about which programs and fields are most likely to help them be successful.”
It’s not at all hard to imagine what this would lead to – academic programs where students are financially “incentivized” to pursue what investors prefer rather than follow their imaginations and ideas. Even if they do take the incentive route, they run the risk of a lifetime of indentured servitude to their financial backers should the market for their chosen career turn sour after they graduate.
The consequences of such a financial arrangement are harmful to businesses too. Want to be that creative writing major that ends up in the marketing field, or that botany student who pursues food and wine retailing? Forget it. The system run by ISAs will likely never incentivize outliers in our employment system that often end up being the drivers of problem solving and creativity in business.
What’s worse, instead of student debt getting “collateralized,” as the Brookings fellow put it, what really becomes the collateral is not a thing, like a house, but a person: the student herself. If there’s any small measure of good news to come out of the Rolling Stone UVA fiasco — as well as multiple other high profile recent stories about sexual assault — it’s that we’re now having more open and nuanced conversations about rape, and rape prevention. The bad news is that a lot of those conversations are just wrong and dumb.
Take, for instance, a new British summer safety campaign that’s drawing strong reactions for what critics say is a message that carries a strong implication of victim blaming. In an ad, two smiling young women taking a selfie appear with the message, “Which one of your mates is most vulnerable on a night out? Many sexual assaults could be prevented. Stick together and don’t let your friend leave with a stranger or go off on their own.” Because you might be responsible for your buddy being raped.