Students – would you crowd-fund to pay for your degree? | Metro News.
Having just read the news article linked above I felt I had to comment and rebuke some of the obtuse and inflammatory statements made by the poster, who evidently has no clue what they are talking about… The article starts:
Need to raise money for a new project, want to study abroad or just lead a pretty worthwhile life? Crowd-funding can pay for that.
But it might make you feel weird that you’re getting something almost totally free.
Based on the notion that individuals will give you money to support your business or personal ventures for no financial gain, crowd-funding is a concept that makes me feel inherently uncomfortable.
Just call me a child of capitalist values.
What an utter load of twaddle Metro… firstly, people who support crowd funding campaigns are not “giving you money to support your business or personal ventures for no financial gain”… if it is a reward based platform, they are essentially buying the product or service in advance, allowing many innovative creators and inventors to fund the development process where banks and investors might not want to support them (because TRULY innovative products generally do not do well when when measured by an algorithm to calculate the potential return on an investment… Because, hey - they are innovative – and therefore the potential market is hard to predict)…
If it is an equity based platform, they are rewarded with shares…
There are donation based platforms, and they are for charity work and other worthy causes…
After revealing that:
26-year-old Emily-Rose Eastop was slammed after she successfully raised £26,570 through Hubbub, to pay for an MA in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology at Oxford.
The article goes on to ask:
But is it fair that somebody should get something so significant for free, while other students work several jobs to support themselves, take out loans or turn to the bank of mum and dad?
But if you read the few parpagraphs before that in the article it also says:
Emily-Rose, who runs a Facebook page debunking ‘science’ myths, said those who helped fund her will directly benefit from her tuition.
She said: ‘The idea is that you do the masters with me. On (my) blog I will summarise all the cruxes of what I learn and turn it into easily digestible lay person terms.’
So Emily is not getting ‘something for nothing’. Her backers have signed up to reward her for her previous dedicated (and presumably for no financial payment) work on the Facebook page, and in anticipation of extensive work throughout the course of her degree creating more great content that can be enjoyed by the lay-scientist… Hardly ‘something for nothing’ then… in fact as a blogger myself I would be so bold as to suggest the work she will do delivering this content will take her many more hours a week (and be far more valuable to society as whole) than a part time job in a Weatherspoon’s pub to pay for her way through university!
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