student life

Something I heard from someone else last week triggered a vivid memory from my undergraduate days. I was in the financial aid office submitting something or other, and as I was leaving I ran into an acquaintance who was also on his way out. He was in quite a state, so I asked him what was wrong. He bitterly replied that his request for more grant assistance had been sharply turned down. Not yet having entirely evolved into the tactful person I am today, I asked why exactly that was a problem.

He looked at me like I had sixteen heads and retorted,

"'Cause I'm POOR!"

Granted, I should have seen that coming and headed it off at the pass. You'd never know it to look at the guy, though. This was a rich-ass private college, where most of the kids came from wealthy backgrounds; my middle-class upbringing was definitely on the the low end of the spectrum relative to my peers. Some of them thought I was insane for working part-time for four years, but it was what I had to do to cover housing, books, and personal expenses, which was what my parents expected me to contribute along with scholarship-worthy grades. (As an aside, it made me an excellent time manager and I still graduated with honors.) This guy in particular had always been one of the kids in the class with great clothes (I remember particularly that he happened to be wearing a gorgeous, buttery, leather coat that day), no part-time job, and plenty of money to strew around for entertainment. I never would have guessed at any lack of resources.

And therein lies the dilemma: this rich-looking, rich-acting guy didn't have enough personal or family money to stay in school to complete his senior year. In The Millionaire Next Door, Stanley and Danko refer to this phenomenon of keeping up appearances as big hat, no cattle.

This memory came to the forefront in the context of another acquaintaince's current graduate school experience. She's 39 and attends a very expensive private school in New York, where she's getting a Ph.D. It'll be her third graduate degree, and she has no funding. She's spent some time in the workforce, but I'm not sure how much. She does have a job now, but it's part-time and I have no idea how much it pays.

This woman always has money to spend: the other day, she proudly announced that her new hairstyle had come at the bargain price of $55. She also has great clothes, a spacious rental apartment, and plenty of money to go out and have a good time. That's all well and good; I figured her parents are bankrolling her, and why not? It's between her and her family, and how they choose to allocate their resources is no one else's business.

Only once again, things aren't quite what they seem. One night a few months ago, this woman told me that her parents are struggling financially and she's worried that they'll never be able to retire. She also told me that not only are they not contributing to her graduate school education, they have absolutely no idea of the grinding, crushing burden of student loans she's taken out.

Big hat, no cattle.

I feel sorry for this woman. Her studies aren't in a discipline that tends to be paid very highly, unless she becomes a Washington policy wonk. She's very smart and that could certainly happen; I'm not convinced from what I've seen, though, that it's very likely. I have no doubt that she'll get the degree she's after, but at what cost? She'll be paying off her student loan debt for decades.

I'm not saying that poor people shouldn't get an education; far from it. Everything I've read suggests that education is the fastest road out of poverty for the long term. Student loans are a huge problem for new graduates, and that's a topic I want to take on from a less personal perspective another time. What I'm not seeing here is the same thing I wasn't seeing outside the financial aid office in 1990: where is the acknowledgement that one has an obligation to adjust one's monetary outflow in response to life events or, in this case, life choices?

I'm probably posing this dichotomy to the wrong group of readers, but I find it both puzzling and troubling to know that when posed with a dilemma that consists of a money pit, a pile of dirt, and a shovel, some people's first instinct is to dig.

Your thoughts?