Waking Up And Taking Charge Analysis

Financial strain has led to many problems for Millennials. Society today displays a world dominated by knowledge based jobs, meaning you are required to receive higher education to succeed. Many Millennials have attempted to take the initiative and go to college. While college can help you thrive in life, it can also set you farther back than where you started. Tamara Draut, director of the Economic Opportunity Program analyses this issue through personal experience in her essay “The Economic Crunch”. In this essay Draut claims that college is more of a vice than a reward and believes it's the lack of funding that caused this. Meanwhile, Anya Kamenetz, a recent Yale graduate, observes this issue from her own perspective in her essay “Waking Up And Taking
Draut then correlates this inability to succeed with how the government supports its citizens. She makes a contrasts this generation to earlier generations when “if you wanted to go to college, it wasn’t that expensive and grants were widely available.”(493) This along with other economic changes in society had brought Draut to the conclusion that “Government no longer has our back….”(493) Although she does address that the federal government is spending more than ever before on student aid, she believes that this is not enough. In the end, she explains how this generation could have a better time succeeding if student loans weren’t as punishing and lowered their interest rates (492).
The essay “Waking Up and Taking Charge” tackles similar issues with a different approach. Kamenetz starts her essay off by expressing anger towards the current political state of government. In spite of this, She believes that there needs to be a movement for “higher education funding, fairer credit laws, a better-designed school-to-work system … and many other