Group 3C SAPSA Final Video-Trump and Education-Aaron Seitz, Josh Vandermeyde, Rachel Ibrahim

Group Members:
Aaron Seitz
Rachel Ibrahim
Josh Vandermeyde

Section: A03

Video Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq2nslNzivI

Presentation Link:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ifnSWoJ1JaUo5W67eSqSj0MX3kJOY5QUV5HQxs-ZoyY

1. Our SAPSA video takes a look at the Trump Presidency so far and explores how changes Trump is making will impact our education as college students. The video dives into 3 specific areas of focus; decrease in Federal student aid, decrease in funding for research, and decrease in charitable donations. The video explains how each of these will have very severe and dramatic impacts on tuition and the overall quality of the university and higher education. The video then goes on to relate these changes to corporatization of the university as we discussed in class. The video explains that with these different budget and tax cuts, the university will have to resort to businesses for a large portion of their funding which in turn brings the university even closer to the corporate world and its influence.

2. Our intended audience is primarily college students directly impacted by the changes being made. Students need to be aware of where their money is going and how their education is shaped and influenced. We also want to reach a wider audience including future college students and the parents of current and future college students. Although they are not impacted currently, in the near future these parents and students will be paying for and receiving a college education and they deserve to be informed about why they are paying what they are paying and how the educational values being taught are shaped.

3. We believe that our video is effective in covering the major changes being made by the Trump campaign that impact college education. We also believe that we have demonstrated why these changes are important and how they relate to the major topic discussed in class about corporatization of the university. We set out to inform people affected by these changes and show why they should care and consider policy changes made by Trump in the first place. Our video contains a wide variety of facts that help the viewer care about the topic while also staying casual and easy to watch.

4. The major challenges for this project were to find evidence directly relating budget cuts/tax proposals to education and including a variety of visuals that kept the video interesting for the viewer. We addressed the problem of finding specific evidence by carefully reading through trumps proposed budget plan and tax plan to find exactly how education would be impacted. We noticed that evidence such as this was not made very clear presumably because Trump has not made any big push to change higher education. He has mentioned it several times but because it is not one of his big platforms, he disregards how education is impacted by his new proposals but there are obvious ways in which education will change. The other challenge was addressed by adding animations to our video and going around campus to look for inspiration. Because our campus will directly be affected, we felt it was necessary to show just how important these changes by Trump can be by showing parts of our campus that could change or would have changed if this changes had been made earlier.

5. If we could do our project differently, we would add more visuals and recorded video. We liked the idea of the animation because it kept the video simple and made it very easy to display the information we wanted to present. It was also very clean and looked professional. With that being said, we see now that a bigger variety of visuals would make the video more engaging and probably more fun to watch. As of right now the video appeals mostly to people already interested with the topic but to reach a larger audience, we could add a larger variety of visuals that make it fun and interesting to watch for a wide variety of people.

6. We hope that our SAPSA video gets distributed throughout the internet and reaches people of all ages. It is important that many people see it so more people will be informed and driven to help make political change. Many argue about how they do not like Trump but this video gives people the power of knowledge and the incentive to truly make a difference for something that affects so many rather than simply disagreeing with Trump without doing something about it.