Duke Porn Star Tuition Increasing Due To Loss Of Financial Aid
Miriam Weeks, who uses the porn name Belle Knox, will see her tuition to Duke University increase by $15,000 next year due to her increased income.
Weeks wrote an article for Time this week about the increase saying she is ineligible for the $13,000 in aid she had been receiving and her tuition will be $62,000 next year.
“My porn work pays the exorbitant tab for one simple reason: Demand for porn actresses, especially young ones like myself, far exceeds supply,” she writes. “How interesting that the same basic principle explains why my tuition bill is so high in the first place.”
Weeks quoted Sheldon Richman, vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation in her article. “What drives the inflation of tuitions are the various forms of government financing. This is basic economics. If the government stimulates demand through grants and loans, other things equal, prices (tuitions) will rise. It’s supply and demand.”
She said on March 1, the trustees of Duke raised tuition from $44,020 to $45,800 for the 2014-2015 academic year.
Weeks father was a military doctor, so the family moved a lot before settling in Spokane, Washington, where she attended a Catholic high school.
In an April interview with Rolling Stone, Weeks describes how she got into the business in her freshman year. Her dad was working in a private practice, then he got called by the Army Reserves to go to Afghanistan for less than half of his previous salary. Facing a monthly bill for $4,300 they couldn’t pay, her parents suggested she take out loans, despite the hundreds of thousands in debt she would be after graduation.
Weeks had worked as a waitress in high school – a job she said she found more degrading than doing porn. Desperate, she joked to her roommate, “Oh, screw this, I’ll just be a porn star.”
She said she started to consider it. “I Googled ‘how to be a porn star,’ and all of these agencies popped up. And Then there’s this website called SexyJobs.com. It’s like the Monster.com of porn.” Weeks took pictures of herself and submitted them along with a short description of herself. Days later she got a call from a company that offered to fly her to New York for her first shoot, earning $1,200 per scene.
As previously reported in The inquisitr, Weeks identity was revealed by a fellow Duke student after she had done two scenes.
She finished the Time piece by writing “Everyone is focused on my decision to perform in porn to pay my tuition. Let’s start paying attention to what got me here. Sky-high tuition bills result from a culture, from our President on down, telling every kid to go to college, regardless of their future plans or ability to graduate. And they result from schools being all-too-happy to raise prices to catch all the money flowing from the federal spigot.”
[Image via huffingtonpost.com]
