For American’s students with physical and/or mental handicaps, their need, as well as their right, to forms of special educational support have been long established. Not so, unfortunately, for students with economic handicaps. The age of the pandemic has revealed the particular educational vulnerabilities of poor children.
In a very worthy charitable initiative, Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona, is attacking this problem with a university-wide mentoring program, pairing university students with resource-poor public housing grade school students. Read more at GCU Today: GCU students to mentor children in public housing
Here at affordablehousingaction.org, this news also re-triggered our concerns for the plight of “economically challenged” university students themselves. In order to compete in tomorrow’s job market, many are forced to take on enormous debt loads that has left America’s university students collectively in trillions of dollars of debt.
In this time of job-scarce pandemic, there have been growing calls for mitigation, or even complete relief, from student higher education debt. Not that long ago, we mused in a post about how government action in the Great Depression of the 1930’s created the Civilian Conservation Corps to provide financial support for the unemployed.
Moving forward with an ongoing need of college students to mitigate their education costs by borrowing, we wondered whether such as a College Conservation Corps could provide an alternative way for students to guarantee themselves a debt free fresh start on full time employment, with job references to boot. Try Affordable Housing & The Intersection Of Sweat, Debt, War, Good Will, And Where’s Waldo?
Modifying our thinking a little, if not a College Conservation Corps, then why not a university student employment program modelled on this Grand Canyon University voluntary educational mentoring program? We’ll leave it to reader imagination to reconstruct the Venn Diagram that graces this earlier post, in order to explain the intersections between needs and capabilities for a College Educational Corps.
