Gunhee Lee, Period 1, 5/9/2022

Gunhee Lee, Period 1, 5/9/2022

Socio-political Consciousness


What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and/or power.

How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others.


Although what I’m trying to say in regards to an issue of inequity may seem trivial in comparison to some of the things that many people may be having to face around the world, such as ongoing conflicts between governments, oppressive leaders, or new legislation that limits someone’s rights, I felt that this was an issue that is very prevalent for many of my peers. College is expensive. There’s no way to dispute this fact. When factoring things like room and board, the price of attending college often exceeds $80,000, with most applicants banking on the hopes that they will receive a large amount of financial aid from the schools that they are going to attend. Personally, I got pretty lucky. I’m paying under $20,000 a year to attend Boston College. However, I feel that when we have to consider paying over a fourth of my parents’ yearly income on school as lucky, there is something extremely wrong with the system. Additionally, many of my peers were not so lucky. Some of my friends had to make the decision between going to the college they wanted to attend, or the one that wouldn’t break their bank to attend. Others got very bad offers from all their schools, and are wallowing in their sorrow just thinking about the copious amounts of debt they will need to go into. I even saw a Reddit post asking how to unsprain your toe because they clenched their feet so hard when they saw how much they would have to pay to attend their dream school. Especially when considering the fact that college can sometimes be a family’s only hope to escaping poverty, this price tag is extremely off putting. Of course, charging well off students more in order to be able to offer a poorer student more money, I think the way that a student’s income is determined is not thorough enough. There can always be the factor of bias in my words, as I am someone who is directly affected by this, but I do feel that there is a big issue that is not being addressed sufficiently.