One Man Play Discusses Student Exploitation, Loan Debt

Aaron Calafato walks into the lecture hall as though he were a professor casually walking into his class a few minutes late, with the confidence only a professor could have. He brings his copy of “The Athens News” and asks why student debt isn’t explored in more detail on the inside pages. No discussion starts. An audience of about 30 stares attentively. With no cue of the lights or opening of a curtain, the play has started.Calafato is an actor, activist and performer of “For-Profit,” a one-man play hosted by the Ohio University Student Union in Grover Hall Wednesday night. “For-Profit” takes students on a journey through Calafato’s experience as an admissions advisor at a university where his job was solely to enroll students, no matter if the program was right for them or if they could afford it.“I put them into debt in order to pay off my own debt. That’s the truth, no excuses,” Calafato said of his job. He confessed that his debt, combined with his wife’s, amounted to $1,500 a month. “That’s better than most; it’s less than a mortgage.”After graduating from Bowling Green State University with a bachelor’s in communication, Calafato said his debt shamed him as he looked hard for a job to support he and his wife. Tuition when Calafato enrolled was at $11,000 a year but raised each year until it reached $20,000 when he graduated, after just four years. An admissions advisor was the first job he could get, and he took it.“It felt good because it got me through weird dinner conversations with people because they like to put you in a box so they feel better,” he said.The play—performed by, written by and directed by Calafato—unfolded smoothly as Calafato portrayed a slew of various characters, taking on different personalities and voices, but maintained a conversational voice throughout.Calafato’s impersonations and unapologetic use of profanity summoned chuckles - and sometimes, outright laughter - from the audience. But the characters were very real, all alluding to people he had met during his short-lived time at a for-profit university strategically placed in a slum.“A bachelor’s degree is worth the price of a piece of American cheese,” Calafato said, acknowledging that the information may make the audience uncomfortable. “Not the education, not the foundation of the structure of the university itself that makes things like this possible, not those good things. The degree itself. Who you are, what you do, your soul, your value, what you bring to a job … doesn’t really matter. Because employers, they want paper. And that paper costs money and that money means borrowing.”In an age where the national total of student debt has reached $1 trillion, the rising cost of tuition has become a touchy subject, eliciting strikes and protests from grassroots student organizing on an international scale, most notably Quebec.An OU Student Senate survey of 10 percent of the student population revealed that 66.3 percent of students need loans to fund their educations, with 28.8 percent that have over $32,000 in loan debt. Student loan debt is unique in that it cannot be charged in bankruptcy like most other forms of debt.OU has continually seen tuition increases at 3.5 percent every year and, as students learned at Wednesday’s Senate meeting, the university is considering another increase for the 2013-2014 school year.Calafato, artistic director for the non-profit organization Student Debt Crisis that actively campaigns for lower or frozen tuition, said he caught a “glimpse” of a society that is no longer “pay to play” but “borrow to work.”“I caught a glimpse of a world where we borrow just to feel normal. Isn’t that fucking weird?” Calafato said during the play. “I caught a glimpse of a world where having that kind of debt hanging over people’s heads makes the better, more productive, more docile workers.”Calafato was fired after the university started tapping his phone conversations with potential “leads”—what the university referred to potential students as—and was found to have told a student, and eventually friend, to not come to the for-profit university. Calafato described his job termination as a relief.The play was succeeded by a panel discussion from OU sociology professor Deb Thorne, Calafato and Student Union spokesperson Jacob Chaffin.Thorne, who studies consumer bankruptcy, told the story of a woman she witnessed plead with a judge at a bankruptcy hearing while in graduate school. The woman she described had advanced multiple sclerosis and was unable to pay her student loan debt. The judge denied the woman to file her debt into bankruptcy.When Thorne asked if anyone in the audience knew the cost of a degree at OU per year, only two audience members knew the answer: $21,000.Thorne said every year she gets students in her office in tears, “because they are absolutely terrified about what this means. They’re talking about: they can’t have kids, they can’t go to grad school, they can’t go to professional school, they can’t buy a house, it’s destroyed their credit report and they are completely fucked over for the rest of their lives,” she said, “because they’re buried in 60, 70, 80 thousand dollars in debt for a bachelors degree.”Thorne described her frustrations with working at a university that consistently raises tuition while she simultaneously tries “to give a voice to students.”“When I went to college, it was for a passion for learning,” she said. “I didn’t come in to an institution as a student or an employee to be part of a business model to exploit other people in this country.”The panel discussed the proposed Guaranteed Tuition model as well as how to cope with being part of a university that conducts its operations like a business.“It’s this continuous exploitation, and its not overt,” Calafato said. “It’s subtle and it’s an economic violence. It’s a different kind of violence."