College blog #8 The Interview

After some thought on who I should interview for this paper I decided there would be no better person than a current student. So I decided to do this interview on one of my friends that I know who is in the EOF program here at Rutgers. I felt that it would be even more beneficial that he was in the EOF program because it would help show how colleges target kids that come from lower income families. In the interview I asked him what was his opinion on the current debt situation in college and whether he thought that colleges nowadays are starting to treat students like consumers to get the most money out of them. His response to this was that he felt that attending college nowadays is not as valuable as it once was because college has become like a business and the student is of little concern to them. He also told me how this past semester even with the money that EOF provided him he still could not pay remaining balance and was lucky enough to borrow the money from one of his friends to pay it. He also told me that it is unfair how rutgers keeps on raising the cost of everything such as meal plans because students like him cannot afford it. For example next semester he said that he will have to greatly lower his meal plan or even go without one to be able to pay for his tuition. Another thing that he told me which I was surprised by was that he might have to stay another year to get the credits he needs to graduate. The reason for this is that his placement coming in was low and he had to start with lower level classes so now he is behind. This relates to one of my sources which said that colleges want students to stay another year to get more money out of them. This interview really helped me to get a better idea of how students deal with debt and how higher privatization is affecting them.