he show is called Paid Off and it follows in the tradition of
Still, there is a consolation prize. The host brings out a dyspeptic-looking dude in funny clothes and introduces him as the person responsible for the judicial ruling that student debt cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. The defeated contestant gets to throw a pie in his face. COLLEGE AT ANY COST? There are a lot of people like the contestants on Paid Off . And they owe a lot of money. But it wasn’t always this way. In the 1950s and ’60s, a man could graduate high school in Detroit and start working on the line at the Ford plant. He could marry, have children, buy a house in the city, and, eventually, a little cabin up north to vacation and hunt deer. He would work into his 50s and retire with a pension and health care. And his wife may not have worked at all. And on top of all that, if he had kids who had the right stuff for college, they could attend the state university at a price he could afford. And his kid, perhaps, would even be able to pay for it by kicking in what he earned at a summer job or part-time work in school. The numbers are startling. In 1965, college tuition, fees, and room and board ran on average $1,375 a year. That man working at the Ford plant would need to come up with just $155 to pay tuition if his kid attended the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus and lived at home. When he was running for president in 2016, Martin O’Malley liked to tell voters that,
such television classics as Queen for a Day and Family Feud . That is to say, it makes the woes of other people into popular entertainment for a live audience and, of course, those “millions watching at home.” An essential element of these shows is that the people on stage are real and they suffer from real problems. In the case of Paid Off , that problem is student debt. Three contestants compete to answer questions of the Trivial Pursuit sort. But before the questioning begins, they identify themselves and tell the audience where they went to school, what they studied, and how much they owe in student debt. The numbers range from impressive to breathtaking – up into the six figures. The people who come onto the show do so in the hope that they will get some relief from those debts. But only one of the three will. Perhaps even enough to cover the entire balance. The other two will leave with not much more than cab fare home. You can’t help but feel for them. Each came on the show thinking they had a shot. And then they blew it. If they could have just remembered the name of Elvis Presley’s mansion in Memphis, Tennessee in time to hit the buzzer before the other contestant... It would have meant a clean start. Graceland. Damn, I knew that.
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April 2019
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