#campus progress

The Price of Periods

cw: menstruation By Olivia Kersey-Bronec It costs about 5 bucks for a box of tampons. While it may not seem like much, that really adds up. The average menstruator uses about a box of tampons a period cycle which results in an average spending of about $2,200 on menstrual care in a person’s lifetime. The average menstruator uses approximately 11,000 menstrual products (pads, tampons) over their…

“The idea of becoming a better person—that, I think, is what education is ultimately about,” William Astore, a professor at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, told Campus Progress. Astore has written on the trouble of viewing education as a commodity, a means to an economic end. He argues that education is also valuable because it improves critical thinking, ethical living, and personal self-actualization.

There’s a great illustration of this in a 2006 report from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It describes Marie Rose, a Burundian refugee who had been granted asylum in Cuba, where higher education is free.

Marie Rose showed off a litany of diplomas to the UNHCR reporter—she had completed courses in “Spanish, Italian, computer studies, massage, negotiation and secretarial skills amongst others,” according to the report. Not because those certifications would score her a job, but simply because Cuba’s de-commodified education system had given her the opportunity.

The idea might make you wince. But the status quo should make you wince even more:

Here is the central paradox of American college sports: It’s a multibillion-dollar entertainment spectacle, but the people who make it all possible—the athletes—don’t get any of the profits.

To resolve the contradiction, the NCAA has for decades relied upon the notion of the student-athlete. The idea is that college athletes aren’t professionals, but rather young people playing a sport as one of the myriad activities available on a college campus designed to cultivate all-around personal growth; "the Athenian concept of a complete education derived from fostering the full growth of both mind and body," according to a federal judge quoted in Taylor Branch's must-read investigation "The Shame of College Sports." For their time and effort, student-athletes are compensated not in cash, but in scholarships that make their education possible.

But critics argue that, in practice, there is hardly a healthy balance between “student” and “athlete.”

“Ask a player what would happen if they didn’t show up to a workout or game, even if they were attending class,” said Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, a non-profit that advocates for college players. “They would lose their scholarship.”

Capitalism, schmapitalism. A little team spirit and the absence of a money-grubbing landlord can lead to substantial savings:

Amarro Nelson has lived at House of Commons in Austin, Texas for about six months. He’s a grad student at the University of Texas at San Antonio and landed a scholarship for a semester-long internship in the Texas state legislature. Looking for housing in a pricey city, “I ran into the cooperative,” he said, “and I was looking at how much it cost and the value they had and I thought that it would be a great fit for me.”

Nelson isn’t a UT-Austin student, but most of his housemates are. For them, the co-op living cuts their living expenses roughly in half. According to Austin’s Inter-Cooperative Council, a year of housing, utilities, and food in the co-op costs $6,347, while a year in the dorms is $10,715.

Co-op proponents say the savings come from the absence of a landlord who needs to work a profit into the price of rent, and that tenants benefit from economies of scale.

Or at least to cut him some slack.

I’m one of those people who see the Miami Heat as basketball's Evil Empire, or like the bad guys in an underdog-story kid’s sports movie. I still haven’t forgiven LeBron for “The Decision” (or for beating the Pistons in the 2007 playoffs). Having him, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh—three of the league’s elite players—on the same team just feels like stacking the deck. It’s as though a team that talented is supposed to win. What fun is that?

But Mychal Denzel Smith has me reconsidering. I spoke to him yesterday for a story I’m writing on money in college sports, and as an aside he said:

In 2010, when LeBron James and Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh all decided that they were going to play in Miami together, what you saw was a shift with black men taking control of their destiny in professional sports and no longer being necessarily what William Rhoden called the “40 million dollar slave,” right? They were understanding their value, and understanding the market, and understanding what it is that they bring to the table. And capitalizing off of their talent and their business savvy in order to do what it is that they wanted to do in order to make themselves more profitable and their brands more profitable.

Well, so to speak. A housing cooperative actually makes students part-owners of their house, even if only for a couple years. It can bring benefits material and non-material:

“Cooperatives aren’t trying to make money off of everyone,” Crawford said. With no surplus needed for a landlord's profits, students in housing co-ops can keep costs down.

Other, perhaps more potent advantages can’t be measured in dollars and cents. If we accept the premise that the typical buyer-seller relationship is inherently undemocratic—for instance, a renter has no control over their housing situation except what is specifically granted to them in their lease—then a co-op offers students greater self-control.

“Instead of students paying large sums of money to live in a dorm where they have no control over what happens, who they live with, how they’re governed, et cetera,” said Crawford, co-ops put students in the driver’s seat.

While the specific methods vary, the idea is that students use a democratic process to set rents, decide what repairs are needed, and figure out who is responsible for which chores. They can even sell their house if they so choose, Crawford said. (But not to cash out—the money would be held by the co-op as part of the zero equity structure.)

The group that is paying Millennials to care about the national debt:

Peterson bankrolls the “Campaign to Fix the Debt,” which calls for cuts to popular programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—an agenda Peterson has been pushing for a long time—in the name of eliminating deficits.

The Can Kicks Back is the project’s youth wing. Its mission is to convince Millennials that previous generations have kicked the deficit can down the road, and that the nation which young people are inheriting will be a bankrupt one. “Future investment has been cut to pay for present and past,” the group’s website reads, tracing the impending penury to a growth in entitlement spending.

It’s a pernicious tactic, according to Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy.

“They’re trying to create a division between young people and the elderly,” she told Campus Progress.