In this cartoon, we can see a woman advising a student / a guidance counsellor.
- The student wonders why he should go to college.
- The woman has logical answers:
– if he goes to college, he’ll get a good job,
– if he gets a good job, he will get/earn a lot of money,
– if he has money, he will be able to pay back his college loans.
= going to college will provide him with a good job which will pay well and will enable him to pay off his college loans.
2.The guidance counselor : What she means !
- She is a guidance counselor but does not say he should go to college to learn more things,enrich his culture. She has a realistic/practical/ matter-of fact point of view.
The irony
- What makes it funny/the irony: if you need to go to university just to get money to pay the bank back, why bother? = the guidance counselor is in fact saying that going to university is not a good idea = contrary to what she should be doing.
3.The cartoonist’s message
- The cartoonist wants to denounce the sacrifices students have to make to study: they have to ask for loans to study, but in the end they have to spend all their money on paying them back. So it would probably be better to try to avoid student loans, and that seems to be what Crystal did.
4.Anticipation on the contents of the text
- Given the title of the text, it must be a student’s testimony about how she managed to pay her college fees without asking for loans.
- Perhaps she got a part-time job / may have had a part-time job / must have had a job.
- Her parents may have saved money for her.
- She may have asked all her family to help.
