As a father of five, the cost of college is on my mind. I try to ignore it but I know it’s coming and I dread it- kinda’ like my wife’s London broil.

College is expensive. But don’t worry, a college professor has bridged the gap between higher learning and the common man by positing in a scientific journal that students should sell their kidneys in order to pay off their student debts. Ahhh, isn’t that a load off your back. If your kids just sell their body parts they can keep college professors earning hundreds of thousands not to keep their office hours.

The Scotsman reports:

Sue Rabbitt Roff believes making it legal to sell the body part would boost the number of organs available to save lives and help students struggling with money.

She argues that donors should be paid the average UK annual income of around £28,000.

It is currently illegal to sell organs and tissues in the UK under the Human Tissue Act (2004) and across the world apart from in Iran…

The Dundee University academic makes the controversial comments in an article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) today. Mrs Roff, senior research fellow at the university’s Department of Medical Sociology, told The Scotsman: “We are allowing young people to undertake £20,000 to £30,000 of university fee payments.

“We allow them to burden themselves with these debts. Why can’t we allow them to do a very kind and generous thing but also meet their own needs?”

Ethics organisations argue changing the law would exploit poor people desperate for money.

However, Mrs Roff wrote in the BMJ article: “One reservation that many people express about such a proposal is that it might exploit poor people in the same way the illegal market does now.

“But if the standard payment were equivalent to the average annual income in the UK, currently about £28,000, it would be an incentive across most income levels for those who wanted to do a kind deed and make enough money to, for instance, pay off university loans.”

That’s awesome!

Maybe we could do it by scale. Maybe you’d just have to give a finger or two to get a business degree, and maybe a spleen or a kidney to become a doctor. And maybe you could donate your brain if you want to become a college professor. It doesn’t seem that at least one of them is using theirs.