A Modest Proposal to Solve the Student Debt Crisis: A National "Roast Your Professor" Pay-Per-View

Because $1.7 Trillion in Debt Isn't a Policy Failure—It's a Missed Entertainment Opportunity 🎤🔥

You know the feeling. That email from your loan servicer hits your inbox with the same emotional impact as a subpoena. 📧⚖️ That physical envelope feels heavier than a physics textbook, filled not with knowledge, but with the ghost of a burrito bowl you overpaid for in 2010. It’s the unique, cold-sweat dread of seeing a number so large it should represent a down payment on a house, but instead represents a metaphysical anchor chained to your ankles, dragging you slowly to the bottom of the ocean of your own potential. 💸⛓️🌊

We’ve tried everything. Politicians dangle forgiveness like a carrot on a stick held by a sadist. 🥕😈 Pundits on the right scream about "useless degrees" in gender studies, as if the only valid career path is becoming a gender-neutral cog in a corporate machine. Pundits on the left scream about "indentured servitude," while sipping from mugs that say "This Machine Kills Fascists" they bought with their trust fund dividends. Your uncle at Thanksgiving, a man whose entire expertise is based on successfully assembling an IKEA bookshelf once, looks you dead in the eye and says, "You should’ve learned a trade." 🔧🤡

Folks, we have a national crisis on our hands. And it’s not just a debt crisis. It’s a crisis of imagination.

So, I propose we stop treating this like a problem for economists and start treating it like the prime-time spectacle it was always meant to be.

I present to you, with all the seriousness this farce deserves, the only viable, bipartisan, and frankly, entertaining solution to our national nightmare:

The National Academic Roast-Off (NARO). 🎉

A Pay-Per-View extravaganza where students can roast their professors into oblivion for a chance at student loan forgiveness. Finally, a platform where your ability to deconstruct a professor's fragile ego is worth more than your ability to deconstruct a sonnet.

I. My Academic Purgatory: From Apathetic Subscriber to Reluctant Graduate 🎓😴

Let’s be clear from the jump. I was not a scholar. I was not an "academic." I was a subscription service user on the "Secure Path™" plan, paying a premium for content I never used. My student ID wasn't a badge of honor; it was a login for the world's most expensive, poorly designed streaming service. 📺💸

I attended lectures like they were mandatory software updates—annoying, time-consuming, and they always, always broke something that was working perfectly fine in my brain. "New update available: Calculus II. This may restart your will to live several times." 🧠💥 Installing... 1% complete.

For the first two years, my ambition wasn't just low; it was a ghost. A faint whisper in a haunted house of deadlines and 8 AM classes. I was running a race on a track I didn't build, for a prize I couldn't even visualize. Was it a corner office? A Beemer? The ability to confidently use the word "synergy" in a meeting without vomiting a little in my mouth? 🤢

The driving force wasn't passion. It was a low-grade, humming fear of the "What Else?"

What was the alternative to this prescribed path? The terrifying, formless void of uncertainty. The specter of falling behind, of becoming that person at the high school reunion—the one who "couldn't bear the load." The system is genius, really. It isn't just selling you an education; it's selling you an identity—"Graduate"—as the only proven antidote to existential terror. It's a protection racket for your own future. 🎭🔫

I had a teacher telling the students in middle school, "We’ll see, we’ll see who makes it and who’ll be flipping burgers."

Scary I know 😭

Then, a miracle occurred. Somewhere in the final, desperate third of my program, I stumbled—blind, bleary-eyed, and fueled by cheap coffee—into a branch of my field I never knew existed. It was a specialization, a niche, a hidden door in a hallway I'd been pacing for years.

It wasn't a lightning bolt of passion. Let's not be dramatic. It was more like finding a specific, useful tool in a giant, messy toolbox I’d been forced to carry for years. A tool that actually fit my hand. It felt less like a prison and more like a key. 🗝️

I started caring. I excelled. I became, against all odds, one of the lucky ones—a graduate with a job actually in my field, a living testament to the system's occasional, accidental success.

But here’s the kicker, the part that keeps me up at night: Luck should not be the foundational pillar of a trillion-dollar industry. Building a system that only works for the fortunate few who stumble upon their purpose before the interest capitalization crushes them isn't a system. It's a casino. And the house always wins. 🎰😭

II. The Roast-Off Blueprint: A Bipartisan Masterpiece of Edu-Tainment 🎪🤡

Forget policy papers. Forget debt relief applications that require a PhD in bureaucratic hieroglyphics to complete. The NARO is elegant in its beautiful, brutal simplicity. It’s the free market solution your conservative uncle and the "eat the rich" socialist in your poli-sci class can finally agree on. It’s the Thunderdome of higher education, and we’re all just waiting to see who gets the last word. ⚔️🎤

Let's break down the rules of this glorious, bloodsport-esque game show:

The Stakes: Your Future for Their Fragility 💰😭

This isn't for participation trophies. This is for your financial soul.

• The "Chuckle Payout": You land a joke. The audience titters. $1,000 of your debt vanishes into the ether. Poof. Gone. Like your motivation during an 8 AM lecture on tax law. 😴💨
• The "Standing Ovation Savior": You unleash a joke so potent, so universally relatable, that the entire studio audience rises to their feet for a full 30 seconds, weeping with laughter and existential recognition. BOOM. 50% of your debt is OBLITERATED. That’s a whole year of your life, given back to you. 🙌✨
• The "Academic Annihilation": This is the grand prize. The holy grail. You deliver a sick burn so devastating, so existentially annihilating, that the professor stops, stares into the middle distance (seeing their own life choices flash before their eyes), quietly sets their tenure certificate on fire, and walks out of the arena to start a new life as a goat farmer in Vermont. 🐐➡️🏞️ CONGRATULATIONS, GRADUATE. YOUR DEBT IS COMPLETELY ERASED. You are free. 🏆🗽

The Host: The People's Champ, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson 🧉💪

Why The Rock? It’s simple. We need a man who can look a sobbing, tweed-clad Victorian Literature professor in the eye, flex a single pec, and say, "IT’S ABOUT DRIVE, IT’S ABOUT POWER. WE STAY HUNGRY, WE DEVOUR... THEIR WILL TO LIVE, PROFESSOR. NOW CAN YOU SMELL-LELL-ELL-ELL WHAT THE STUDENT IS COOKING?!" and have it feel both deeply inspiring and like a scathing critique of late-stage capitalism. He’s the only man with the emotional range to high-five a victorious student while simultaneously giving a eulogy for the professor's career.

The Judges Panel: A Triangle of Beautiful Chaos 🔺🔥

We can't have normal judges. This isn't American Idol. This is war.

1. The Venture Capitalist (Sitting in a solid gold chair):

   • Name: Chad Thundercock, Partner at "Disruptive Synergy Ventures."
   • His Criteria: He doesn't care if it's funny. He cares if it's "monetizable."
   • Sample Feedback: "I’m not seeing the scalable business model in your joke about your professor’s caffeine addiction, Kevin. The TAM for 'burned-out academics' is shrinking. Now, if you could pivot this into a SaaS platform for student-led coups, we’re talking a Series A funding round and 100K forgiven. I’m a maybe." 📊💼

2. The Tenured Critical Theory Professor (Sipping a kale smoothie):

   • Name: Dr. Persephone Moonshadow.
   • Her Criteria: She’s here to deconstruct the very nature of the roast itself.
   • Sample Feedback: "Fascinating. Your invocation of the professor's 'dad bod' isn't merely an insult; it's a performative subversion of the patriarchal gaze, problematizing the hegemonic construction of the academic body within the neoliberal university. However, by engaging in this phallogocentric mockery, you are merely reinforcing the capitalist superstructure you seek to escape. I award you points for unintended irony, but deduct for latent complicity." 📚🌌

3. David Attenborough (Whispering into a microphone from a soundproof booth):

   • His Role: To narrate the carnage as if it's a serene nature documentary.
   • Sample Narration: "And here... we observe the magnificent, yet desperate, Studentus loanius. Having trained for years in the dense jungles of the lecture hall, it now employs its most potent weapon: sarcasm. Watch, as it targets the soft underbelly of the Professor tenurus, a larger, slower creature, protected by its thick hide of tenure. A direct hit! The old beast is stunned, reeling. A truly remarkable, if rather sad, display of the educational food chain in action." 🐠🎤

Training Camps: Forging Gladiators ⚔️🏕️

You think you can just walk in there and wing it? NO. This is why we have NARO Bootcamps, sponsored by Uber Eats and Red Bull—the official fuels of desperate all-nighters.

• Module 1: Rhetorical Flamethrowers: Learn to turn your professor's own syllabus against them. "You demanded 15 peer-reviewed sources for a 5-page paper? I'm citing your own crippling imposter syndrome as my primary source, Brenda." 🔥📝
• Module 2: Comedic Timing & Trauma Dumping: Master the pause. The look. The art of weaving in a personal story about living on instant ramen for so long you now sweat MSG. 🍜😢
• Module 3: Handling the Aftermath: Role-play scenarios. What do you do if your professor starts crying? (Answer: Roast them for their lack of emotional resilience, a key skill in today's economy). What if they faint? (Answer: Point out this is the most engaging their lecture has ever been).

This, my friends, is career readiness. This is the real "gig economy." This is the final exam the university never knew it was preparing you for. Welcome to the big leagues. 🎓💥

III. The Real Roast: Holding the Entire System Accountable 🔥🎓

The beauty of the NARO isn't just in watching a tenured philosopher sweat through his tweed jacket under the hot lights. 😥🧥 No, no, no. The true magic happens when the roasts stop being about the individual and start targeting the entire, crumbling, ivy-covered edifice of modern education itself. This is where the comedy becomes catharsis, and the jokes become indictments. It’s exorcism by punchline. 💥🙏

Let's step into the arena and witness three gladiators take on the three-headed Cerberus of our academic hellscape.

Roast Target 1: The "Useless Degree" (A Love Letter to the Right) 🇺🇸📉

The Setup: The spotlight hits BRAD, a Business Major whose soul is 70% Excel formulas and 30% pre-workout. He’s facing DR. SERAPHINA EVERGREEN, a Professor of Post-Colonial Feminist Poetry who exclusively wears clothing made of hemp and her own disappointment. 🧘‍♀️🍃

The Roast (as performed by Brad, who is definitely wearing boat shoes on stage):

"Ahem. Dr. Evergreen. Your seminar, 'The Deconstruction of Brunch in Patriarchal Systems,' was... an experience. For the low, low price of $40,000—which, for the VC in the room, is a post-money valuation of my entire future—you taught me that avocado toast is a symbol of late-capitalist ennui." 🥑🍞

"But here’s my question, Doc: What’s the EBITDA on ennui? What’s the market capitalization of a perfectly deconstructed hollandaise? My ROI on your class is lower than the resale value of a Chegg subscription! For that $40k, I could have bought bottomless mimosas for everyone in this studio for a YEAR, and we could have deconstructed the patriarchy EXPERIENTIALLY while getting a solid, fiscally-responsible buzz on! We’d have achieved class consciousness AND a decent blood-alcohol level!" 🥂📊🤪

"You gave me the tools to critique systems of power, but you didn’t teach me how to get power. You taught me to question everything, except the bill for questioning everything! My degree in 'Interdisciplinary Critical Studies' is the financial equivalent of setting a stack of hundred-dollar bills on fire to toast a single, sad marshmallow." 🔥💵➡️🍡

The Layer: This roast is a beautiful, screaming eagle for the right-wing uncle who thinks anything without an immediate profit margin is communism. 🦅😡 It mocks the reduction of all human knowledge to a simple balance sheet. But beneath the snark about hollandaise, it asks a painfully valid question: In a world of soul-crushing debt, when does the 'life of the mind' become a fiscal death sentence? When does intellectual curiosity become a luxury good only the trust-fund kids can truly afford? It’s the sound of the free market having a panic attack in a poetry seminar. 🤯📚

Roast Target 2: The "Safe Space" (A Nod to the Left) ☮️💸

The Setup: CHLOE, a Psychology student who has self-diagnosed half her cohort with anxiety, stands across from her department head, DR. WINSTON, a man who has written three books on "Trauma-Informed Pedagogy" but can't figure out how to use the PowerPoint clicker. 👩‍⚕️🧑‍🏫

The Roast (as performed by Chloe, who begins by leading the audience in a collective breathing exercise):

"Okay, everyone. Inhale... exhale... I’d like to offer a trigger warning for my next joke. It contains scenes of graphic economic reality, discussions of fixed interest rates, and may be harmful to those with a fragile grasp of market forces." 🚨💹

"Dr. Winston. My guru. My guide. You taught us how to create 'brave spaces.' You taught us to sit in circles, to use 'I feel' statements, to validate each other's lived experiences. It was beautiful. It was... warm." ✨❤️

"But you failed to mention one tiny, itsy-bitsy, little detail... THE RENT ON THAT BRAVERY IS $800 A MONTH, PLUS UTILITIES! My 'safe space' is a 300-square-foot studio with black mold and a landlord who only accepts 'validation' in the form of a cashier's check! You prepared me for a world where everyone is emotionally intelligent, but you left me defenseless against a world where my intelligence is worth less than my monthly student loan payment!" 🏚️💸😭

"You taught me to hold space for my feelings, but you didn't teach me how to make enough space in my budget for both feelings AND food! My emotional support rabbit and I are one missed payment away from our own lived experience of homelessness!" 🐇⚰️

The Layer: This roast is a perfectly crafted, artisanal, gluten-free scream into the void for the left. 🥖 It satirizes the beautiful, well-intentioned, but often painfully insular nature of campus discourse. It highlights the brutal, whiplash-inducing disconnect between the curated, emotionally-sanitized environment of the university and the cold, unforgiving, "sink-or-swim" competition of the "real world" students are supposedly being prepared for. It’s the sound of a hugbox colliding with a spreadsheet. 🤗💥📈

Roast Target 3: The "Broken Promise" & The New Face of Fear 🤖💔

The Setup: This is the main event. The air is thick. The crowd is silent. JASPER, a Graphic Design student whose passion has been made precarious by AI, stands before his aging professor, PROFESSOR ABERNATHY, a man who still thinks "the web" is a passing fad and has a framed poster of a Helvetica specimen sheet in his office. 👨‍🎨👴

The Roast (as performed by Jasper, with tears of rage and Adobe Creative Cloud subscription receipts in his pocket):

"Professor Abernathy. You sold us a dream that was already on life support. You taught me to master the Bezier curve... just as AI learned to generate a thousand flawless logos in the time it takes me to brew a pot of coffee I can't afford." ☕🤖⏳

"You taught me the sacred rules of typography, of kerning, of leading... while a machine in the cloud learned to break every single one of them in ways that clients now call 'innovative.' You promised me this degree was a shield against irrelevance, but it turned out to be nothing more than a beautifully typeset, embossed, and utterly worthless receipt for my own obsolescence." 🛡️➡️🧾🚮

"You prepared us for a world that stopped existing the moment we walked out of your classroom. You were teaching us to paint on cave walls while the Sistine Chapel was being 3D-printed outside. The future you promised us—the one with creative agencies and pension plans—was a lie. And the bill for that lie, Professor... the bill for that beautiful, nostalgic, sepia-toned LIE... came due with 7% INTEREST." 🎨🕳️💸

"You didn't just fail to prepare me for the future. You sold me a timeshare in the past. And now the HOA fees are bankrupting my soul." 🏖️😈

The Layer: This is the core. The heart of the darkness. This isn't about a fear of not being rich. This is the fear of being economically homeless. 🏠❌ It’s the terror that the unique craft you love, the skill you bled for, is being commodified into nothingness by a ghost in the machine. It’s the realization that the "secure path" you mortgaged your future for leads directly to a cliff, and your diploma is just the paper you wave as you fall. It’s the sound of a generation realizing the map they bought is for a country that sank into the ocean. 🗺️🌊

And this... this... is where we find the nuanced, uncomfortable, and terrifying truth. 🎯💣

IV. The Unspoken Question: The Race and The Uneven Fingers 🏃‍♂️✋

Let's pause the circus for a moment. Stop the laugh track. Cut the music. 🛑🎶

There's a question that's been haunting this entire spectacle, one that whispers from the empty lecture halls and screams from every loan statement. It’s the ghost in our national machine. 👻⚙️

From the time we're old enough to hold a crayon, we're handed a map. Not to treasure, but to a race. A single, grueling, winner-take-all marathon with a finish line called "Success." 🗺️🏁

The path is meticulously charted: Get the grades. 🅰️ Get the degree. 🎓 Get the job. 💼 Get the life. 🏡 The starting pistol fires in kindergarten, and we all start sprinting, fueled by a primal, bone-deep fear of the abyss that opens up for those who stumble, who fall, who simply can't keep pace. 😨🕳️

But here’s the quiet, human tragedy nobody wants to talk about at career day:

What if you were born to be a sculptor, and the race is a 100-meter dash? 🏃‍♂️➡️🗿 What if your genius lies in patient, careful observation of the stars, but the track is built for relentless, mindless speed? 🔭➡️🐌 What if your heart beats in 4/4 time, but the world only rewards those who can code in binary? 💓➡️💻

We are not a monolith of ambition. We are a gorgeous, chaotic, messy collection of different talents, different rhythms, different dreams. 🎻🥁🎨

Forcing every single one of these unique souls onto the same narrow track, with the same soul-crushing financial stakes, isn't education.

It's a brutal, industrial sorting mechanism. It's running a diverse ecosystem through a woodchipper and calling the resulting mulch "progress." 🌲➡️🌲➡️➡️🧻

Some of us, like me, eventually stumble into a groove we can run in. We get lucky. We find a side-path that somehow connects to the main track. Many, many others don't. They break. They burn out. They collapse under the weight of a load they never asked to carry, for a prize they never truly wanted. 🥺💔

And then the system looks down, adjusts its glasses, and asks, with all the sincerity of a spreadsheet: "But what's the alternative? The world is competitive. We have to prepare them for the real world." 📊🤖

And you know what?

They're not entirely wrong.

Let me be painfully, vulnerably human for a second. I use AI to write and create art for this very website. It’s a tool that makes the impossible, possible. I can't afford a human artist for every banner. I can't hire a team of researchers. This technology is here, and I use it. It’s a tool. A terrifyingly powerful, disruptive, world-changing tool. 🤖✨

It is rendering old paths obsolete. It is making the world more competitive. To stand in a lecture hall in 2024 and pretend that the creative or analytical career of 2004 still exists unchanged is more than ignorance. It's a form of academic malpractice. 🎓❌

So here we are, stuck in the most painful paradox of our time:

The race is real. The competition is brutal. The world does not care about your feelings. 🌍💥

BUT.

The training camp we're all forced to mortgage our futures to attend? It's selling us maps to a country that no longer exists. 🗺️🇽

We're forcing a 20th-century solution—"Go to college, get a stable job for life!"—onto a 21st-century problem—"The gig economy, AI disruption, and globalized labor markets!"—and then we have the audacity to wonder why everyone is so anxious, so medicated, and so drowning in debt. 💊😥💸

We're being taught to fight tomorrow's war with yesterday's weapons, and the tuition for this outdated arsenal is more expensive than ever. It’s like taking out a loan to become the world's best VCR repair technician. 📼🔧😭

The system sees a hand with five uneven fingers and tries to force it into a single, uniform glove. It fails to understand that the strength of the hand lies in its beautiful, necessary, glorious unevenness. ✋❤️

The race is real. But we've built a stadium where only one type of runner can win, and we're charging admission to everyone else just to watch their own dreams fade into the distance. 🏟️👀

To be honest, I don’t know if there is a solution, or even if there is a problem there which needs a solution, maybe just a situation. I have no idea. 😅

V. The Final Truth Bomb 💣

Let's not kid ourselves. The National Academic Roast-Off is a monstrous, absurd, and frankly unhinged idea. 🤪👹

But let me ask you this:

Is it any more monstrous than a system that corners an 18-year-old—a person who literally just learned how to do their own laundry—and asks them to bet $100,000 on a future self they can't even imagine? 🎲👶

Is it any more absurd than a tenured professor with a gold-plated retirement plan lecturing you on the "gig economy" from behind a literal ivory tower? 🏰📦

Is it any more cruel than an economy that dangles the dream of creative fulfillment like a carrot, while simultaneously engineering the robotic stick that will beat that very dream into a pulp? 🥕🤖🔨

The NARO isn't the problem. It's the symptom. It's the logical, grotesque, and glitter-covered endpoint of a system that has already sold every last one of us down the river. It's the final exam where we finally admit the quiet part out loud:

Modern higher education is not a sacred journey of enlightenment. 🕊️📚

It's a transactional, high-stakes gladiatorial combat for basic economic survival, desperately dressed up in a cap and gown. ⚔️🎓

The real punchline isn't that we're sitting here, seriously considering turning our trauma into prime-time entertainment.

The real punchline—the one that should haunt every chancellor, every politician, every "thought leader" in their cozy panel discussion—is this:

For millions of us, the dream is no longer a corner office. It's not a six-figure salary. It's not changing the world.

The dream is a piece of paper from a loan servicer that says $0.00. 📄✨

The dream is being allowed to stop running. 🛑

And if the only way to get that freedom is to humiliate our mentors on national television... then maybe the system has already given us the most valuable education it ever could:

A masterclass in the art of the ruthless, desperate deal.

It taught us that everything has a price. Even our dignity. Especially our future.

We learned our lesson. We're just choosing our own final project. 🎓💼

Think this is the only way to get an ROI on your diploma? ❤️🎓 Follow the beautiful, screaming descent into madness on Twitter 🐦💫 @Allen_Fried Find more cathartic roasts and nuanced takedowns at FriedReads.com 🔥📖

The system is a joke. We're just finally learning to laugh—and we're charging admission. 😄🎟️