As college tuition continues to skyrocket, students are seeking out creative ways to pay for higher education. For some, that means taking their clothes off for money.
A growing number of college students are joining OnlyFans, an explicit subscription platform, to make ends meet, according to a Fox News Digital report.
A 21-year-old student named Shayna Loren told the news outlet that she started posting on the platform at 18 years old after presenting her parents with a detailed business plan related to how she could pay for her tuition. “I talked to my parents, wrote up a business plan and was like, ‘Hear me out, I know this is crazy, but just give this a chance,” she said.
She now boasts more than 700,000 Instagram followers and has successfully used her earnings to pay for her education — and help her parents retire.
College tuition and fees have surged drastically over the past two decades, easily outpacing household income growth. This has made college unaffordable for many American families. Between 1999 and 2019, “the average tuition and fees at public four-year schools increased by 84%,” while “the average cost of tuition and feese at a public four-year institution represtened over 35% of median household income, up from approximately 18% in 1999,” according to SSTI.
These increases are a result of rising faculty costs, administrative expansion, investments in facilities and technology, and decreasing state funding.
Some experts expressed concerns about the growing trend. Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist, told Fox News that students using OnlyFans “are putting themselves in danger because some men start to believe that the girl is putting on this act for them personally.”
Former NYPD officer Bill Stanton cautioned, that young Americans are “living in two world, the cyber world and the real one” and that “for some those lines become blurred, sometimes with dire outcomes.”
“Creating a fantasy for those paying into an OnlyFans account may not be enough for some wanting to take a perceived online relationship into the real world,” he added.
If one wants to understand why tuition prices have increased so rapidly, they only need to look at how government policy has contributed to the problem.
For starters, the more the government gives students in loans and other forms of aid, the more the prices rise. When the state makes it easier for students to borrow more money, colleges jack up their sticker prices because they know people can afford to pay more for an education. They know that the state will cover at least part of the cost.
A 2015 New York Fed study revealed that when loan limits were raised, colleges increased their tutition by about 55 to 65 cents for each extra dollar students could borrow. Another study showed that schools that are eligible for aid charge about 78 percent higher tuition than schools that do not accept federal aid.
Government regulations also play an essential role. The state imposes a significant regulatory burden on higher education, including accreditation, reporting, financial aid compliance, Title IV rules, and others. This barrage of regulations results in administrative costs that schools must cover by raising the cost of enrollment. In fact, a 2015 Vanderbilt study estimated that universities and colleges shell out roughly $27 billion per year just to comply with the regulations.
The fact that federal funding is fungible is also an issue. When schools take in more revenue through loans, grants, and other aid, they do not respond by lowering prices. Instead, they just spend more money — on nicer dorms, athletics, fancy schmancy buildings, marketing, and whatever else they can think of to waste money on.
Because the aid goes to the students, not the college directtly, schools don’t feel pressured to lower tuition. It treats that extra money the same way a drunken sailor does instead of giving students a financial break.
Unfortunately, this has created a situation in which a growing number of students feel they have to resort to shaking their derrieres on video to make enough money to earn a degree. This is not the way it is supposed to be, is it? But this is what happens whenever government gets involved.
