I’ll
Take Cash Check or Money Order
My college degree cost me roughly $40,000. When you add up what I owe in student loans, what I paid for books plus living expenses and food that’s a really conservative estimate. Add to that missed earnings from the full time job I would have had had I not gone to school. So I would guess that the final amount would probably come closer to $100,000. If I consider how much money I spent on “girls nights out,” to help me deal with the stress of course, the figure goes much higher.
Why
am I bothering to figure this out? No it’s not to depress myself, although now
that you mention it, I am feeling a little less chipper than I was when I
started this. But I digress; my
point is quite simple. I want a refund. Now
you might be saying to yourself, “She wants a refund? Is she crazy?”
I
ask you this. If I bought a TV and it didn’t do what it promised, i.e. showed
my favorite shows, and I wanted to return it, would I be crazy then? Sure there
wasn’t actually a piece of paper stating that this educational folly would
guarantee me a job, but it was IMPLIED. After
all, what person in their right mind would go through the hassles of college if
there weren’t at least an implied job waiting at the end of it?
I
can’t believe I actually went through all that. Those sleepless nights I spent
studying. The doomed relationships based mostly on the fact that we happened to
be in the same place at the same time. Then,
there’s all the fast food I was forced to eat and whatever health problems all
that bad food and behavior will eventually cause. I think that I’m being kind
just asking for the money back that I actually spent.
I
know that I will have a hard time getting a refund. They’ll say they never
promised me a job. They’ll toss around words like ingrate and make sweeping
statements about how learning is valuable for it’s own sake. To these feeble
arguments I say this, “Give me my money back!” They may not think I’m very
intelligent but even I’m not stupid enough to go through all that without some
sort of promise of a payoff.
I
am also not stupid enough to believe I have a snowball’s chance in hell of
ever seeing a dime of that money again. I just want those people who charged me
$80 a semester for a parking permit when there were no parking spaces to know
I’m on to them. To those teachers who made the books they wrote workbooks just
so you couldn’t sell them back; “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Then there are those school administrators whose job it is to make up
fees. “You people cost me that trip to Las Vegas and that new sweater and
whatever it was I was saving up for when you decided it was a great idea to
charge a fee for the oxygen I was breathing while on campus.”
They
can even have my diploma back if they want. Maybe they can get more for it then
I’ve been able to.