Indian American porn star slams Obama administration for exorbitant college tuition fees.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Miriam Weeks, the half-desi Duke University student who turned to pornography in her freshman year to help finance her college education, has lost the student aid money she was previously receiving from the school.
Weeks aka Belle Knox made the announcement in an op-ed for Time Magazine, which got published on its website Monday afternoon. The somewhat rambling blog post ultimately touches on everything from Weeks’ perception that Duke University has over-estimated how much of a financial burden her parents can bear for her education, all the way to how President Barack Obama and the US government are creating a student loan bubble that will eventually burst.
When Weeks was revealed as a porn star earlier this year, she explained that she was resorting to adult entertainment as a way of alleviating the amount of money her parents would have to pay for her college education. The youngest of three children, Weeks has a stay-at-home Indian origin mother and a father who is a well-paid military physician – but after already putting two kids through college, her parents would be hard-pressed to send Weeks to Duke, she reasoned.
Weeks was receiving $13,000 in aid from Duke University, which brought her total financial obligations to just under $50,000 per year, but now even that has been taken away from her. And the reason for this? Because Weeks is making enough money with her pornographic work to no longer qualify for financial aid.
“This year, even after student aid, I faced a $47,000 bill to attend Duke University,” Weeks says in the Time blog. “To make matters worse, my income now makes me ineligible for the $13,000 in aid I was receiving. My bill for next year will be a staggering $62,000. And I will pay this all on my own; the financial aid office does not care that I am legally financially independent. They view it as my parent’s [sic] responsibility to foot the bill.”
Weeks goes on to criticize the US government for putting, as she says, too much of an emphasis on college educations. She also takes Duke University to task for driving up tuition costs that she sees as unfairly exorbitant.
“Government must stop the flow of money to schools in order to get tuition rates under control again. That means being honest about the fact that not every child should go to college,” says Weeks.
“Only 59% of full-time, first-time undergraduate students who began their pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at a 4-year degree-granting institution graduate in four years,” Weeks continues. “That also means making students who can’t afford tuition out of pocket find funding in the private market, where lenders are too judicious to lend someone $150,000 to get a BA in underwater basketweaving [sic].”
By shedding light on what Weeks sees as the underlying problem of college tuition costs and the pro-college culture of the US, Weeks is hoping to turn the spotlight away from what pretty much everyone has been paying attention to the entire time that she’s been famous – why did she choose to do porn, of all things?
“Instead of focusing on my decision to perform in porn to pay my tuition, let’s start paying attention to what got me here: artificially inflated demand for college that pushes tuitions sky high,” she writes.
Regardless, Weeks gives no indication of quitting her porn career anytime soon, and will need it more than ever to cover the extra $13,000 Duke is now making her pay. Although she laments that her busy porn schedule keeps her away from her family, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be seeing less of Belle Knox for the foreseeable future.
Weeks is set to begin her sophomore year of college in August. In the meantime, she is working on a porn reality show, in addition to her own individual shoots that pay her as high as a few thousand dollars each.