Welcome
Welcome to Jeff Anderson’s Get Paid to Learn project.
The goal of this project is to help you find ways to pay for your college education and minimize your student debt so that you can spend more time on building the life you want to live.
Get Paid to Learn Activities
One incredibly harmful set of policy choices that we make in the United States is to transform college education from a public good into a private privilege. From the 1960s through present day, our state and national governments have continued to dis-invest from education leading to increases in tuition prices for students and their families. This shift has resulted in student debt crisis in the trillions of dollars and a massive toll on young people.
It’s important to say explicitly: this problem is not random. It’s the predictable outcome of a sustained neoliberal attack on public investment in education. It’s a byproduct of the fact that corruption is legal in America so that the ultrawealthy can use their money to capture our government and extract wealth from everyone else. In fact, for the people in the top 0.1% of the wealth distribution, the exact people who have waged this war on the 99.9%, this student debt crisis is a good thing: it means that the ultrawealthy pay less in taxes and can hire employees who are much less likely to unionize or go on strike because they are saddled with debt.
This student debt crisis is a symptom of our larger system of wealth supremacy that financially benefits a very small number of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males at the expense of everyone else in society.
To counteract these policy choices, we believe the best remedy is to get educated and engage in democratic processes at your local, state, national, and even international levels .
As you do so, we encourage you to advocate for more learner-friendly policies and to act in solidarity with others who share this vision. However, the process of policy reform will be difficult and require decades (or even centuries) of sustained activism. In the meantime, we want to help you find ways to pay for college and minimize your student debt. That is exactly what our Get Paid to Learn project is focused on.
On this Get Paid to Learn project homepage, you will find a number of resources to help you learn how to make money in college and minimize your debt while earning your degree. We provide blog posts, interviews, handouts, exercises, YouTube videos, spreadsheets, and many other resources. All of this work is designed to make the process of earning scholarships easier and less intense. Remember though, scholarships are a stop-gap measure to counteract under-investment in education. The real fix happens when we act together to force our democratically-elected representatives to invest more in education. Cheers to that journey and the struggle. Remember always: we are here to support you!