Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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MARCH 12-18, 2014 UCW 5 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM Every parent who has ever sent a child off to college knows what I am talking about. Along with the mixed emotions of pride, the wistful end of one era and the exciting beginning of a new one, and the prolonged goodbye hugs from both sides comes another, longer lasting parental emotion. Worry. We parents worry about everything, issues both large and small. Are our children safe? Do they have friends? Are they going to classes and can they handle the academic work? Are they eating right and taking care of themselves? Wellbeing always weighed on my mind, particularly since my own college days came long before the invention of salad bars, healthy food stations, and elliptical machines, and I remember well the proverbial "freshman fifteen." I worried about all so many possibilities and impossibilities that I cannot even remember them all. Never, though, not once for a single second did I worry that one of the Precious Jewels might go into the porn movie industry as a college freshman. That career option never, ever occurred to me as something a mother should be worrying about, and I did not. Blessedly, it apparently did not occur to any of the Precious Jewels, either. A student at Duke University, however, says it did occur to her and that she has been commuting to California on weekends plying her newly found on-screen trade. She recently revealed her new job status in confidence to a fellow student who promptly broke that confidence. The result has been a firestorm of conversation not only at Duke, which has been very touchy about such matters since the lacrosse players' scandal nearly a decade ago, but all over the Internet as well, including a sort of op/ed piece the student actress penned for a website. I confess that I have not totally bought into the Duke student's story, mainly the flying to California part. Are the moviemakers paying for her airline tickets when there are plenty of wannabe actresses available in California already? Or is the student using her own resources for those tickets? If she is paying, that has got to be cutting into her profits. I think there is probably much more to this story than we may ever know, but for this column, let's take her at her word that she is making pornographic films — and loving it, so she says — to offset some, if not all, of Duke's hefty $60,000 or so annual tuition bill. She, like every other college student, would like to graduate debt free. First of all, whether any of us like it or not, pornographic films are, for the most part, legal in our country, so the Duke student, a legal adult, is not breaking any laws. She is also strongly and articulately defending her line of work as her own free choice as a woman and no one else's business. She is also standing up to a barrage of ugly and vulgar criticism aimed at her, often anonymously. She is obviously a person of courage, but the mother in me cannot help but worry about the future facing a woman who has put herself in this position at the tender age of 19. You and I may not know her identity, but many others do. Fair or not, my guess is she has some painful times ahead. She has nevertheless shone a spotlight on questions already being asked in more conventional and less dramatic ways. How much is a college education worth? Assuming no tuition increase, a Duke diploma costs nearly a quarter of a million dollars, which certainly raises the question of how much is too much. And how much student debt is acceptable? We have told Americans for generations that a college degree is the ticket to upward mobility and a better standard of living. Is that really possible when many of the jobs available do not pay enough to make a living, support a family, and service student debt? How much debt is too much? One hundred thousand? Fifty thousand? Ten thousand? At what point will student debt deter people from going to college? In short, is the cost of higher education and its accumulating student debt hurting our nation and compromising our collective future? I do not know the answers to these questions, but I do know we need to address them and sooner rather than later. I know something else, too. I am really, really glad the Precious Jewels have already finished college for all sorts of reasons. What Is Your Education Worth? by MARGARET DICKSON MARGARET DICKSON, Con- tributing Writer, COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly.com. THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET Contest&RequestLine: 910-764-1073 www.christian107.com KeepingtheMainThing...theMainThing. visitusonline FocusontheFamily 20Countdown Magazine Adventures in Odyssey Serving Fayetteville Over 50 Years! 484-0261 1304 Morganton Rd. Mon-Sat: 6am-10pm Sun: 7am-2:30 pm Banquet rooms available up to 100 guests H a p p y With rising tuition costs, some people are going to extremes to finance their education.