Ivory Tower

90 minutes of children whining "SOMEONE ELSE SHOULD PAY FOR MY LIFE". A pathetic, disjointed, chaotic mess. An 8th grader with an iPhone could make a better movie. Watching students stage a sit-in because the college threatens to make them pay tuition for the first time (EGAD THE HORROR) is the essence of first-world infantilized narcissism. There is no narrative to the film, no beginning-middle-end. It's as if the director passed around a camera and asked everybody to "talk about education stuff for 5 minutes". At best, it's a (horrible) campaign commercial for Elizabeth Warren, as is the website. There is no 'there' there. A convoluted and inept political hack job. Save your $15.

When I was a high school teacher, one of the more controversial things I did was to encourage my students NOT to go to college like so many of their peers. Instead, I encouraged them to work or go to trade school. Why? Because college, for most young people, is not a great investment any more. You often don't get more out of college than life without it...particularly in regard to prospective job earnings and college. For example, if a student takes on $100,000-200,000 in debt, they might never be able to pay it off...whereas a student learning welding or plumbing or accounting might live a very happy life with little, if any, debt. And, many kids who could barely complete high school were being pushed straight into college...and they almost always failed. Needless to say, many parents weren't happy with me telling their kids that there were alternatives to college. When I and other parents were undergraduates, college was affordable...you could work summers to pay for upcoming two semesters. However, today this simply isn't possible for most kids...and this film dares to say it.

"Ivory Tower" is a very good documentary. It shows many different sides and allows the people to talk. A few seemed completely off-base, such as those who insanely think the system is not broken or those who demand free university education...as someone must pay for it. But many didn't seem weird and offered alternatives...such as non-traditional colleges and the students in the commune, of sorts, in San Francisco where prospective students don't do college but live together and teach each other how to be entrepreneurs. I liked these alternative voices and think the film would be fantastic for teens and their parents to watch together. After all, they'll soon have to make a decision...one which can be very costly./

"Ivory Tower" is an informative documentary of how higher education has been robbing students and their parents with the rising cost of tuition and fees over the years. This documentary is going to show how colleges are leaving students with debt they can barely afford for an education that might not land them the perfect high paying job they wanted as well. It's amazing how some of these big colleges are becoming more like resorts than places of education and that's some of the extra things the students are paying for. What makes this worse is the fact the students will be more interested in socializing and partying than getting the education they're blowing their parents money on. They're actually paying for things that really have nothing to do with a good education. After seeing this film you'll be wondering is it worth it to go to or send your kids to college now. This documentary does have a flaw or two but cinematic perfection isn't really the main point of this film. This film is to let people know what they are going to be dealing with before they enter college themselves or send someone to college.

I know a lot about this subject because I've written a few papers on the issue of student loan debt... this movie taught me absolutely nothing I didn't already know, and like others have stated, offers no solutions for solving this problem (which are pretty clear-cut, by the way). This documentary had very little direction, wasn't particularly engaging, and didn't really serve much of a purpose. And it also made no mention of the model other countries use to fund higher education, which was pretty surprising. My advice: skip the documentary and do your own research. You'll learn a lot more that way, and probably in less than 90 minutes.

Like a lot of kids graduating from high school I was "brainwashed" into thinking a college education was the end all or be all to success. I ultimately found the education I received was severely lacking in giving students the necessary tools and skills needed to survive in the real world.

While this documentary wasn't perfect it did point out the absurd amount of debt kids unfortunately have to take on to graduate. In my opinion the whole college program needs to be seriously overhauled.

As I said I didn't find this documentary perfect but at least it brought some of this stuff to light