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Staring at the cost of college, some ask the internet to help pay the bills

 
Jenn Flansburg, a 45-year-old teacher and single mother, has created a GoFundMe page with the goal of raising $17,000 to help cover the cost of a master's degree in mental health counseling. "I figure I've got nothing to lose," she says. "If people want to help out, amazing. I'll appreciate it and put it to good use." [ALESSANDRA DA PRA  |   Times]
Jenn Flansburg, a 45-year-old teacher and single mother, has created a GoFundMe page with the goal of raising $17,000 to help cover the cost of a master's degree in mental health counseling. "I figure I've got nothing to lose," she says. "If people want to help out, amazing. I'll appreciate it and put it to good use." [ALESSANDRA DA PRA | Times]
Published Sept. 15, 2017

TAMPA — Jenn Flansburg found an old journal recently. She had written so hard that the pencil broke.

"Anger, hatred, jealousy," she recalled. "It consumed me."

Finding peace took time. It took a lot of visits with her mental health counselor. It took humility, especially the day Flansburg returned to her third-graders at Carrollwood Day School and felt all eyes on her.

Flansburg got help then. Now she's asking for a different kind of aid.

"I don't know if I can say it without crying," she said. "I got another chance, I don't know why. I just feel like I have to do something with it."

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An idea came to her one night. She could become a therapist, like the one who saved her life. She would.

But she has two kids and two tuition bills. And though she has side jobs and a neighbor who pays to sleep on a mattress in her front room, she still doesn't have nearly enough for the $17,000 in tuition it takes to get a master's in mental health counseling at the University of South Florida.

So she's asking the internet for money.

• • •

At first, hundreds of dollars came in. Parents of former students left encouraging comments on Flansburg's GoFundMe page. One gently pointed out some uncharacteristic typos. Flansburg had set up the page after dental surgery, woozy from the medication.

"Maybe I should feel shameful about doing this," she said. "I figure I've got nothing to lose. If people want to help out, amazing. I'll appreciate it and put it to good use."

Scarier than baring her financial need, Flansburg said, is the threat of all of that debt. She'll enroll no matter what, but every dollar helps.

Crowdfunding has become commonplace. Hopeful filmmakers post trailers on Kickstarter, and freelance writers find fans on Patreon. Parents with sick children ask strangers to ease the burden of their medical bills.

And as college costs keep rising, it's no surprise that students are asking for help, too.

In the last three years, more than 130,000 GoFundMe users have raised $60 million for college expenses, according to the site, which takes an 8 percent cut.

Still, college finance expert Mark Kantrowitz advises students not to get swept up in crowdfunding's promise. Dividing that $60 million out shows that the average campaign got $461.54 — hardly enough for a couple of classes. Many times, it's the student's own family donating, he said.

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"Most of them, there's just a handful of people, and there's a comment: 'Way to go, Johnny. Signed, Dad,'" Kantrowitz said. "You would be more effective in calling up Grandma and saying, 'I need money for college.'"

The phenomenon does boast its success stories. One of the first was an English student who made a web page with a million pixels, each sold for $1. Reporters clamored for interviews, companies bought out blocks and the student made his million.

"The first person who does it might be successful," Kantrowitz said, "but the people who follow aren't necessarily going to be successful."

Take a young woman named Emily-Rose Eastop, who was slammed as a "posh brat" on her crowdfunding page — and then in tabloids — as she tried to raise £26,000 for a master's at the University of Oxford.

"It's my right to ask people for help, just as it's their right to refuse," she told The Telegraph in London.

Donors get to decide what they deem worthy, said GoFundMe spokesman Bobby Whithorne.

"There are millions of folks out there who want to help others," he said. GoFundMe just asks people to tell their story.

• • •

Flansburg, 45, was in such a hurry to get her page online, she didn't share hers.

Home life was hard. Her mom died young, and her dad remarried several times. She felt out of place in Miami, where people wore diamonds to Publix.

She started seeing a counselor when she was 12. In later decades, she'd open up about body issues, fear, money, heartbreak.

Now in Tampa, where she lives in a quiet house along a threadbare golf course, she spends her days teaching and tutoring. She loves her third-graders, so genuine and curious about the still-innocent world. She was sad to leave them when things got dark, amid her divorce from her husband of 14 years.

Freshly alone, she struggled with bills and seethed with anger. Her friend moved in and coached her to cook breakfast again. Flansburg often called her counselor, Georgette.

Slowly, life resumed.

Classes resumed.

An idea took hold.

• • •

On GoFundMe pages like Flansburg's, USF students make their pleas.

Joshua McNeel said his parents have a biblical resistance to debt. Juggling jobs and scholarships, his family got close to paying his whole way. Just $3,000 would get him to the finish line.

Shanae Wright asked for $20,000 for tuition. She's 20 years old, the first in her family to leave Jamaica for college.

Mercedes Anderson needed $1,385. Her dad cut out after his last child support payment. Her mom worked extra shifts, held yard sales, stretched their dollars. Anderson was four semesters from a business degree.

About 63 percent of USF students have financial need, the school said. Many of them work. And this is in Florida, with some of the lowest in-state tuition in the nation. Over the years, as college costs have risen, government aid and family incomes haven't kept pace.

• • •

Flansburg had seen a teacher set up a GoFundMe page for breast cancer costs, so with her school's support, she followed suit. She thought back to a young girl she taught this summer, who desperately needed someone to trust. She loved being that person.

She knows the next six or seven years of night classes will exhaust her. To make ends meet, she won't give up teaching, or hosting jewelry camps, or offering Hebrew lessons. She'll turn her garage into an apartment and rent it for extra cash.

"I want to see what I can do," she said.

One day, she hopes, people who need help like she once did will walk into that apartment for their evening appointments.

Contact Claire McNeill at (727) 893-8321 or cmcneill@tampabay.com.