The Four Types of Financial Aid Resentment

Supposedly Zero Financial Aid

Richer people are often the most outraged about perceived injustices, whether it is because the rich have the leisure to ruminate on their gripes or because entitlement inevitably leads to disappointment. Instead of thinking they are paying what they can afford, rich people feel that they are subsidizing poor students.

No matter how often the rich are told that everyone’s tuition is subsidized–whether by taxpayers, tax breaks, industry, endowments, donors, or even the tuition of other rich people–it does not sink in. Rich people are blind to the ways they get a free ride in life and are more likely than other groups to feel wronged.

The very privileges that give rich students an advantage in academia–expensive coaches and enrichment programs, foreign travel, sports camps, bribery–make rich people feel they have already paid too many times over for their children’s education.

Underlying the resentment of the rich about the cost of tuition is a fundamental rejection of the demand that they share the institutions that promote and protect their privilege. This is particularly true at small private schools where family ties often reinforce the perceived naturalness of the generational transfer of wealth among the elite.

Middle Class

The current system of high admin costs, high tuitions, and an opaque sliding scale all mean more middle-middle-class and upper-middle-class families need financial aid than ever before. They are not happy! Not only do middle-class people have to bear the unexpected new psychological burden of accepting “charity,” they generally find financial aid is not enough to make education as affordable as it was for their parent’s generation. This combination is particularly galling to middle-class people who are used to attributing their wealth and success to their own intrinsic value and hard work.

The notoriously complex paperwork necessary to file for financial aid drills down on middle-class perks like a shared family cabin, a boat in storage or a great-aunt’s bequest can cause a defensive reaction to cry poor. But the financial scrutiny in the process also exposes the middle class to the invasive surveillance that poor people experience all the time under the gaze of the shaming welfare state. It doesn’t feel good.

Poor people have always had to exist at the caprice of irrational and punitive institutions that are only out to protect themselves. Now, middle-class people are getting a taste of that disempowering experience.

Encounter the outrages: The financial aid system assumes parents married each other and stayed married, with no new families to account for. Parents are expected to spend everything they have saved on the first child’s education with no provision allowed for paying for subsequent children unless the other children happen to be in the same level of education at the same moment. While most students at rich colleges went to private schools, private school cost is not part of the family expense calculator. Non-liquid assets like a house are counted as wealth that could go toward tuition. The ubiquitous but unexpected expenses of life are not accounted for in the calculations of the “expected family contribution.” On top of draining their finances and accepting aid, even well-to-do families are required to take on a lifetime of debt.

All of these factors highlight what white middle-class Americans could pretend not to know just a generation ago: that their privileges are subsidized benefits controlled by the elite and can be taken away at any time.

Supposedly Full Ride

Students who don’t pay any tuition end up paying in the form of forced gratitude. The cruelty directed at the “privileged poor” is a massive tax on supposedly free education.

In order to succeed in the middle-to-upper-class world of primarily white institutions (PWI), there are a host of costs not accounted for in tuition, room and board that are beyond the reach of students with a full package. It can be a full ride to nowhere. Transportation to and from school, the expensive uniforms of the educated classes, the trips, add-on programs, and extras that offer insider access to employment are almost never part of “free.” Social connections are important to upward mobility, but the cafes and restaurants are closed to students trying to make ends meet.

Even if the intent of free tuition is, in part, a sort of reparation to the academic outsiders who have driven our economy on their free, forced or low-paid labor, the overwhelming message to these students is that they are lucky freeloaders. Rarely are legacy students with generations of wealth supporting their privilege questioned for having bought their way into academia. But poor students at PWI are treated as if they don’t belong.

Subsidized students who are part of affirmative action face a double cost at PWI. They are asked to do the job of integration and represent “diversity” as well as reflect the supposed beneficence of institutions that treat them like second-class citizens.

Students who receive full tuition often feel they are indebted to the institution even if they don’t technically owe money. Athletes can pay this price with their bodies through repeated injury and long-term physical risks like arthritis and dementia.

Demoralized Financial Aid Officers

Stressed-out FA officers are well aware:

Rich people buy their way in.

Middle-class people are lied to about their financial aid making education affordable.

A full ride is not really a full ride.

The system is rigged to inflate tuition that pays for admin bloat.

People cheat.

These sad realities are one of the many reasons that FA officers are so unhappy. When your job involves doing things that you think are wrong, it is called a moral injury and it has real health and wellness consequences.

A secret consensus exists among FA professionals that a better alternative to our complex, outdated and expensive system would be an honor system with a short online questionnaire that would give families a suggested tuition so they could set their own rate.

Advocating for this reform would mean eliminating the jobs of FA officers, so there is zero incentive to reform from within, a perfect formula for resentment.

The Four Types of Financial Aid Resentment