The Morality of a For-Profit College, in One Act [View all]

[Blue_Tires]

Months into his job as an admissions counselor at a for-profit college somewhere in the Midwest, Aaron Calafato began to grow increasingly conflicted. Responding to the college's pressure, he says, he was signing up poorly prepared students for expensive degree programs that would leave them heavily in debt, all so he could make sure he himself had money he needed to keep paying off his own student loans.

"I couldn't sleep at night," he says. He worried for the guy to whom he was "peddling a degree for $28,000 in criminal justice and he doesn't need it." He questioned the morality of a company that would entrench itself into a struggling neighborhood and take advantage of its residents, and he wrestled with his own culpability in the process.

Now in a new one-man play called For Profit that Mr. Calafato wrote and performs, the character of "Aaron," an admissions counselor at For Profit University, wrestles with some of those same moral questions. They include one that Mr. Calafato finds so central to American society right now: "How far will you go for your own economic security?"

An actor by training, Mr. Calafato, 28, says the 75-minute production—which has already been staged in venues in New York City and in the Cleveland area, with future stagings in the works for Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—is his attempt to translate his yearlong experience through the medium he knows best.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Morality-of-a-For-Profit/131417/