“Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun
That will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks…
Small have continual plodders ever won
Save base authority from others’ books”
(Love Labour’s Lost, act 1, sc. 1)
Comment. Biron’s ambivalence about the value of education may be kept in mind by those young men (and especially ladies), eager to enter universities, those prestigious business houses dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of sundry captains of erudition. For one thing, as widely predicated, a university education does not guarantee wealth while it ensures debt. Besides, by and large, corporations prefer to employ foreign H1 visa holder at a lesser price. Furthermore, education does not need the lofty and intimidating looks of many prestigious houses of erudition – such as the façade that simulates the defensive details of a medieval keep, to be surmounted with embrasures battlements and a (make-believe) loop-holed turret.
A penchant for the classics will make a ‘cultured’ man out of anyone – and the current structure is not designed to encourage but to discourage enthusiasm. If not else, the thought of the ever growing costs to be repaid dampens the hope of many. Besides, any college student (and teacher dispensing erudition), should be at pains to free himself from the (possibly transient) preconception that the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men is, in the end, to be more to be desired than the acquisition and expenditures of riches by the astuter men in the community.
But the acquisition and expenditures of riches may be your goal and you may see it via the aforesaid business houses dealing in merchantable knowledge. If so, do the gargantuan costs concern you?
Fear no more, help is on the way. And this at no cost to you, the student.
As always in America, if there is a will, there is a way – witness a new business model, born in 2005 and now in its eighth year of explosive growth.
Online services offer “sugar daddies” to college students deep in debt. Various sites such as SugarDaddyMeet.com, SeekingArrangement.com and SeekingTuition.com solicit mostly female students to create “sugar baby” profiles and establish “mutually beneficial relationships,” exchanging “companionship and sex” for monthly allowances and gifts. No, I am not making it up – I checked the sites a few seconds before writing this.
College student membership on SeekingArrangement.com, a website that matches “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies,” has increased by 58 percent in 2012. Leroy Velasquez, public relations manager at SeekingArrrangement says to ABC News, “Currently we have over 2 million members, 44 percent of which are college students”. Explaining the appeal, he said, “It’s very difficult to retain a part-time or full-time job, especially when you have an academic life.
“With SeekingArranagement, we offer these types of relationships.… We are in a very recessive economy, tuition costs and costs of living have increased and people are finding alternative ways of funding a college education, in this case becoming a sugar baby.”
Brandon Wade, CEO of SeekingArrangement.com denied that it is a front for prostitution. “It’s really about a romantic relationship between two people. The only difference is that the sugar daddy is very wealthy.” And another of these ruffians said, “A prostitute is just conducting a black-and-white transaction that is in no way a relationship. What we have at SeekingArrangement is a lifestyle.”
By the way, as pointed out before, there is no cost for the student. “Sugar daddies” and “sugar mommies” pay a monthly membership fee to access e-mails and full profiles of potential sugar babies. The cost varies by site, between $600 and $2,400 a year, to gain elite access.
Ah, the beauty of freedom, democracy and hyper-capitalism…
Suggestion for use. When the subject of conversation drifts towards the high cost of “education” – quotation marks purposely added.
In the play. Biron presents his argument against the quest for erudition as proposed by Ferdinand