Can a Facebook Status Pay for Your College Tuition?
A recent surge of students, in particular here at Cornell University, have turned to the public for assistance in paying for their tuition fees through crowdfunding efforts on sites such as GoFundMe. The Cornell Daily Sun recently reported on two students in particular who drew attention to the idea through social media sites, in particular Facebook. Jonah Hephzibah ’16 found success through this and raised over $20,000 to help cover the remaining tuition not paid for by the scholarship he had received, which has spurred similar campaigns by more students. In this day where affordable college is a campaign issue in the upcoming election, these students are turning to innovative solutions to age-old problems. The responses to these crowdfunding efforts have not all been positive, as the article reported, but ten years ago they would not have been possible to begin with.
These students are taking advantage of the connectivity of the web, its interactive nature and the large network of users who sift through data at such a rapid rate. They have the advantage of the way that, especially Facebook, sorts data by popularity so that once it’s users start spreading and viewing the content the larger the audience of people that the crowdfunding link can reach. The general ease of transfer between sites (think of them like nodes) through simple hyperlinks also gives them the ability to reach a much wider network of people that otherwise might not be soliciting or interacting with the GoFundMe site. No matter one’s particular opinion about this tuition-paying strategy, it is inarguably one that could not have been possible without the Web 2.0 era we live in. When the future of completing your education is at stake, it demonstrates the vast power of a simple Facebook status.
Article referenced: http://cornellsun.com/2015/10/13/second-student-turns-to-gofundme-to-raise-tuition/