Stripping: The New Way For Women To Work Their Way Through College?

Posted May 3, 2014 08:03 by Alan

“Bell Knox” isn’t the only one to pay tuition by taking off her clothing. Take Vaughn Jackson, for example, also known as “Hennessy.”

School: Baruch College

Major: Foreign language (Jackson speaks Arabic, Spanish and French)

Stripping since: September

How she got started: “My first semester, I was working five days a week at the 40/40 club from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. trying to cover expenses like books. It’s crazy. You put yourself through hell. My grades sucked. Because of that, Baruch pulled all my financial aid . . . They said you need to get your grades up before you can get it back. But I couldn’t pay to go to school and get my grades up. It was a Catch-22. I couldn’t even go to the bank and take out a private loan. I tried everything. And so my friend said, ‘Come to Show Palace. [You can] make $1,500 one night and that’s a payment on school.’ So that was a quickly solved problem.”

Or Maran Gorham, AKA “Xena.”

School: School of Visual Arts

Major: Graphic design

Stripping since: November

How she got started: “It started for a performance art project I wanted to do. I had been taking stripping classes, but they were too expensive, like $500 a month, so I decided to take the traditional route in learning how to pole dance and work at an actual club.”