Princeton: physics, philosophy and pornography

You need to go to college. You have to get an education to be successful. You must have a neat, little degree on your wall to get a job. It’s always an ultimatum, and it seems almost ubiquitous for our generation and the ones that will follow: Without a college degree, employment in the modern economy is virtually unattainable. And yet CollegeBoard, the very gatekeeper of universities, reports that the average tuition and fees bill from a public, four-year university has increased beyond the rate of inflation by 27 percent in just the last five school years; the average for private universities like Princeton is still a staggering 14 percent increase since the 2008-09 school year.

But fear not. There are a few positions available to some college students who, faced with the decision either of crushing student debt or forsaking the safety of a college education, can earn hundreds of dollars an hour for work and for only a few hours a week. Alluring, not only because the high rate will quickly put a decent dent in tuition bills (especially compared to minimum-wage jobs, or even $12 an hour university jobs) but also because the low hours of work expected per week fit easily into a college student’s strictly regimented schedule. Any student, too, can find plenty of just such jobs on a website like Sexyjobs.com.

Duke student Miriam Weeks — known on the Internet as Belle Knox — was one such student faced with the "College Dilemma." So is an unnamed, male Columbia student. Both decided that taking one of the jobs you might encounter on SexyJobs.com was preferable to entrenching themselves in more and more student debt. Weeks is a porn star; the Columbia student is a “Boyfriend Experience Escort.” (For clarification purposes, both of these activities are technically legal. The pornography industry — as long as all acts involved are consensual — is a legal one, while the more shadowy world of escorts tiptoes around the law by explicating that any money exchanged is for the escort’s time, not his/her services). Both are from that strata of students too rich for enough aid but too poor to pay the bill.

Usually, if someone told me that what’s-her-name is doing porn or that so-and-so is an escort, I would shrug and ask “so what?” If that’s what they want to do, if they have no moral qualms about it, who am I to impose any moral guidelines of my own upon them? But when students trying to get the best education they can are pigeonholed into the sex industry — with all its stigmas — I get upset. Both Weeks and the Columbia student write about their employment with a tone of pride and ownership, but both of their accounts implicate their high tuition bills as the impetus for their entrance into the adult employment sector. Whether or not either of these students now enjoys what he/she does is beside the point. What these students’ narratives have brought to light is the element of coercion from the American university system and from American society that have forced Weeks and the Columbia student, as well as all students, to consider such means to pay their way to a degree.

It is entirely irresponsible of policy makers (nothing new, from Washington) and the university system to have allowed their students to assume potentially lifelong stigma so that they may continue attending classes. I am not saying, however, that pornography or escort services are shameful jobs or that these students have lowered themselves in any way by entering such industries. In fact, Weeks and her counterpart’s experiences are far more embarrassing to the universities than to the students themselves. Instead of giving students viable options to help finance the education that everyone has told them they needed, universities and the government have forced them to consider options deemed immoral by most of society. And now Weeks (and, if he is found out, the Columbia student) must face the possibility of her potential future employers diminishing her degree because of the very method she used to pay for it.

It is not, then, the actual industries that Weeks and the Columbia student entered that appalls me. It is the underlying idea that, in order to finance an education, some students must accept opportunities they usually would never consider, with potentially lifelong consequences. This is what we should focus on from Weeks’ story. Either college costs must stop rising, or we must reconsider the emphasis we place on college education. That is the ultimatum we, as a society, face. And we, like Weeks and others like her, must find a way.

Mitchell Hammer is a sophomorefrom Phoenix, Ariz. He can be reached at mjhammer@princeton.edu.