Health Care / Medicine, Money, Student Loans, United Kingdom / Great Britain

The New Way To Pay Back Educational Debt: Sell A Kidney!

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My wife and I have made this proposal to our Harvard creditors: they forgive our debt, we give the school a baby. A “pure-bred” Harvard baby that Harvard can dress up or perform experiments on or whatever. It will have to be a black baby, which might underwhelm some Harvard officials, but that’s got to be canceled out by the fact that the media won’t much care about what Harvard wants to do to/with a black baby. The “where’s the justice of Caylee????!!!!!” crowd won’t be on their ass.

I think it’s an elegant solution. My wife thinks I’m getting off easy (because my “contribution” to this form of debt repayment would once again be de minimis). And our creditors say: “We only accept straight cash, homey.”

But I’m just ahead of my time. In the U.K., people are already suggesting that indebted students should be given the opportunity to barter down their loans with sacrifices of the flesh….

The story reads a bit like A Modest Proposal. But as opposed to making a horrifying sacrifice of the innocent, the plan, outlined in The Scotsman, is just what happens when you put a generation of upward mobility seekers into a horrible debt hole:

Students should be able to sell their kidneys for tens of thousands of pounds to pay off university debts, according to a Scots academic.

Sue Rabbitt Roff believes making it legal to sell the body part would boost the number of organs available to save lives and help students struggling with money.

She argues that donors should be paid the average UK annual income of around £28,000.

Roff is looking at students stuck in deep college debt, and a society that allows people to die while waiting for a kidney transplant.

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Obviously, I think young people need to have additional options to get out of debt. But, young people might also need their kidneys. You know, Klingons have two of nearly every internal organ. The brak’lul. Because you’d design something with redundancies if you were an intelligent sci-fi alien species creator. Kidneys are one of the few things humans have two of, and I don’t think I want to live in a society where rich humans end up with a Klingon advantage over the poor humans who had to sell their kidneys in order to pay for learning things like “why we need kidneys.”

Ethicists are generally on my side:

Robin Parker, president of NUS Scotland, said: “Although the lack of available kidneys for transplant is truly tragic given the need, it’s ludicrous to suggest that selling body parts is a viable solution to alleviating student poverty.

“Young people, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, are already being asked to take on huge debt to afford an education. They shouldn’t be expected to remove a body part as well.”

The solution for the great kidney shortage is mandatory harvesting of organs from the recently deceased. I’m not joking about that. In the same way that we look at the treasure-filled tombs of Egyptian pharaohs as a stupid attempt to “take it with you” from pre-modern people, we will one day look at leaving healthy organs to rot inside the bodies of the dead as backwards.

The solution for the great student debt crisis is to reduce the cost of education, not include organs as a revenue stream for faculty and deans.

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I swear, administrators at universities are becoming like zombies: they move slowly, have no feelings, and apparently feast on brains.

Debt-hit students urged to sell their kidneys [The Scotsman]
Students Urged to Sell Kidneys to Repay Student Loans [TaxProf Blog]

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