Canceled: College

The social media account @bu_gigs, a community hub on Instagram where students promote anything from furniture listings to business ventures, opened a new category called “BU SCAMS” this summer. Through this segment, people have the chance to vent if they feel they are being scammed by Boston University. 

In recent years, scams have inhabited a central place in pop culture. Its perpetrators have received lush documentaries, movie deals and mass media coverage. Scams are an American pastime. 

But things are shifting. 

In 2019, there were several scams that defined the year. The Fyre Festival earned itself a documentary on Netflix after a failed and disastrous event in the Bahamas. Disgraced CEO Elizabeth Holmes was exposed for selling blood testing technology that did not work. Rich parents got caught buying their children’s way into college. And a middle-class Russian immigrant got exposed for tricking wealthy people into believing she was an heiress. 

In 2020, however, the scammer is no longer represented by some seedy individual bombarding your Instagram or spam emails. The scammer is now your government, your health care provider and even your university. 

These things have always been true. But I feel that this year is distinct because people are realizing, for the first time, that supposedly stable and trustworthy structures and facilities are quite the opposite.

The pandemic has made it clear that institutions are actually unstable, untrustworthy and entirely unconcerned with human beings — it’s all about money. This is no different for our very own Boston University. 

On the “BU Scams” category of the BU Gigs account, students reported having their financial aid cut because they “didn’t have to pay for housing fall semester” during a global pandemic. Others report several barriers when appealing negligible financial aid packages.

The extent of the scam Boston University is pulling on us was made all the more clear by a stray comment on Instagram. In a post advocating for BU to stop working with Aramark, a food service company that directly profits from and perpetuates the prison industrial complex, one commenter wrote, “prisons & colleges using the same food services … College is a scheme.” 

This one comment put everything into perspective for me. We are literally paying thousands of dollars and years of debt to a university using that money to fund mass incarceration and other destructive structures. This is what the money we spend hours, weeks, years worrying about is going to. Isn’t that a scam?

With all the petitions going around, all the tireless work students are doing to get attention from the administration for the bare minimum, I and other students have been asking ourselves the same question: why are we here?

Why are we giving up our tuition dollars only for that same money to fund the prison industrial complex and go into the pockets of cops who have a history of racial profiling?

Students have mounted several class action lawsuits against BU asking that they not be forced to pay full tuition, and frankly, I’m all for it. But I’m also so exhausted by it, because why do students have to mount full-on lawsuits for our academic institution to see people are struggling right now, and that online teaching is in no way a substitute for a campus education? 

College is a scam — I think I fully understand that now. It’s a carefully-crafted ploy designed to take your money, all under the promise of academic flourishment and job security. It’s a scam I’m actively participating in. 

But even if college is a scam, the very least we could do is try to make it a little more bearable for the next generation of people, who, like us, will be fooled into believing higher education is anything more than a business.