Brad Pitt and the Soaring Cost of Education in America

Sometimes we gain perspective from unexpected sources, from a stray remark or a casual observation by, say, a celebrity.

Such was the case with superstar Brad Pitt. In a recent interview, Pitt was asked about the reportedly $7 million he made for waxing (inscrutably) eloquent (launching numerous YouTube and late-night parodies that the actor himself defended as “fair play’) about the wonder of Chanel No. 5 perfume for men.

“It’s the right moment and it’s a classic brand and I have six kids to put through college.”

Notice the second half of the response: “I have six kids to put through college.”

Even a millionaire-many-times-over like Brad Pitt (not to mention his mega-rich superstar partner Angelina Jolie) needs to put away money for the education of his children.

Has anyone ever made clearer the soaring cost of education in America now?

For those short on celebrity details, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have six children so far: Maddox, 11, Pax, 9, Zahara, 8, Shiloh, 7, and twins Vivienne and Knox, 4.

The yearly tuition fee at exclusive private schools, colleges and universities in America is conservatively estimated at sixty thousand dollars. By the time the Pitt kids are all in college, the cost will most likely have gone up significantly, but let’s run with that $60K per year number. That’s $360K per year for all of them. Let’s also say that, on the average, they will each have 16 years of schooling. That takes the total to $5.76 million. Throw in the inevitable “additional expenses” and the figure of $7 million seems just about enough.

In other words, a superstar like Brad Pitt (and more power to him) can take care of the cost of his children’s education by making an ad. As a devoted dad, he can always rely on his earnings from movies and miscellaneous sources if $7 million were to prove “inadequate.” (Again, to keep the calculation simple, this does not take into account any “contribution” from the equally devoted mom, Angelina Jolie.)

So how does this analysis shed light on the reality for millions of students in America now?

More than 38 million Americans currently have outstanding student loans, to the tune of $1.1 trillion. Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards and autos! And while mortgage and credit card loans can be shed in bankruptcy, student loans can’t. As parents have discovered to their horror, student loans cannot be discharged even in the death of their children! (The website www.change.org is filled with petitions from such parents. The very least you and I can do is to sign these petitions.)

It is not unusual for students to take out, say, $40,000 loans to finance their education in for-profit and vocational nursing or culinary or automotive or similar schools. While the federal government loans have interest rates of about 6%, interest on private loans can be anywhere between 12% to 24%. (A fresh nightmare is brewing: federal student loan interest rates are set to double in 30 days from now under current laws. Go figure!)

The real tragedy occurs when students graduate from these schools and realize that the lucrative jobs dangled before them don’t exist. Many end up doing menial jobs that earn, if they are lucky, about $10 an hour. The dreams disappear but not the staggering loans that burden them for the rest of their lives. They become wage slaves, disillusioned and in deep despair, moving from one temporary job to another, without health insurance and without any of the basic necessities required for a life of dignity. Buy a home and start a business? A cruel joke, indeed.

Sounds familiar? It should. The recent housing crisis that devastated families across America seems to have been a prelude to what has befallen students in America. The cascading effect of trillion-dollar student debt is dragging us down on every front, from education and commerce to the economy and the stability of the nation.

Brad Pitt has inadvertently shed light on the exponentially increasing student debt and the cost of education in America. Unless the cost of education comes significantly down (the impact of free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will not be clear anytime soon) and a way is found to forgive, at least partially, the astronomical student debt, we will continue to lurch as a nation from one Band-Aid fix to another.

A Timely Thriller: "The East"

Timing can transform a good movie into a memorable one. Such is the case with the thriller “The East,” released just as we were waking up to the revelation, thanks to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, that the National Security Agency (N.S.A) has been spying on us, collecting data for seven years on every phone call, domestic and international, that Americans make. The reason given is that same tired trope: To keep us secure from terrorists. (Naturally, the recent Boston Bombing was an exception, as is every other undetected act of terror!)

In the movie, Sarah (Brit Marling) is an undercover agent hired by a private intelligence firm to infiltrate an eco-terrorism cell called “The East.” East consists of a band of furious idealists (Sarah and her employer see them as anarchists) who target pharmaceutical companies that unleash poisonous medicines on vulnerable people and conglomerates that pollute our air, water and soil. (Remember the deadly antibiotic called Fluoroquinolones, or the 2010 BP oil spill, or the arsenic poisoning of water in Small Town, U.S.A, from coal slurry and other industrial wastes?) The group’s manifesto: “We are the East.  Lie to us and we’ll lie to you.  Spy on us and we’ll spy on you.  Poison us and we’ll poison you.” (In this, they are the heir to the late Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey-Wrench Gang.)

It is that “spy on us and we’ll spy on you” motif that has made “The East” such a compelling draw in the wake of the N.S.A spying revelations. Of course, citizens cannot snoop on the government but if a movie can offer a willing suspension of disbelief in these troubled times, we eagerly lap it up.

Other members are suspicious of Sarah but the infiltrator wins over the East’s enigmatic leader Benji (Alexander Skarsgård) and proceeds to destroy the group from within. Yet, imperceptibly, she is also drawn to the justice inherent in the retaliation against the one-percenters who are callously indifferent to the death and destruction they inflict on the marginalized and the powerless through poisonous pills and polluted water.

It is one thing to remain silent when facts are unknown but another when facts are known and we cannot quiet that “still small voice” any longer. It is a moral dilemma we all face in one form or another and which defines us, based on what we end up doing or not doing.

The Internet has undoubtedly facilitated the growth of the surveillance state. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the Internet is the de facto surveillance state, that with every click and blog and email and likes and tweets, we leave behind digital traces that can be used against us at the whim of people in power.

About the intrusion of Big Brother, the increasingly relevant George Orwell wrote in “1984”: “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.” 

About one thing, however, Orwell was wrong, when he wrote in “1984”: “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” We do not have the luxury of such ignorance anymore: We now know that we are being watched and tracked at any given moment.

Greenwald and The Washington Post revealed another secret program under George Bush, code-named Prism, that allows the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. to tap Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, copying audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails and documents to track foreign targets.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama assured Americans after the snooping report broke. He also defended the “program” by shrugging it off as a “modest encroachments on privacy,” justified because, as always, it will “help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

America will not turn into a totalitarian police state along the lines of, say, East Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. At the same time, we must also remember that we cannot remain secure by undermining those values that make us Americans.

Ultimately for Sarah, the end cannot justify the means, and so there is a falling out between the protagonists in “The East.” But it is by no means an unsatisfactory falling out. There is pathos and surprise and moral ambiguity aplenty in the thriller. Particularly in matters of morality, we learn that it does not have to be an either-or proposition, that there is almost always a middle path in which justice can flower when we make an effort to engage our better angels.