Indebted

How Families Make College Work at Any Cost

Caitlin Zaloom

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691195421
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Clases sociales y disparidad económica

How the financial pressures of paying for college affect the lives and well-being of middle-class families

The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to allow their children to be burdened with loans or sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.

Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private. In this remarkable book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty—providing their children with opportunity—and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off. What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the "student finance complex"—the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not.

Superbly written and unflinchingly honest, Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

College—where to go and how to pay for it—is a central concern of contemporary middle-class families, because higher education shapes young people’s future possibilities. For my parents’ generation, who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, a college education delivered economic security and reason to feel confident about the future. Middle-class people believed that their lives would be full of opportunities and that their children’s lives would be too. This is no longer the case. Today being middle class means being indebted. It means feeling insecure and uncertain about the future, and wrestling with the looming cost of college and the debt it will require. It means being dependent on finance—and, crucially, on family—in ways that analysts of class, culture, and economy have not fully registered.

This book is based on a unique research study: more than 160 in-depth interviews with parents and students who are taking on debt to pay for higher education. The conversations broach topics—family history, job security, debt, aspirations, anxiety, and hope—that are rarely discussed outside the domestic sphere. These conversations showed me that the process of dreaming about, planning around, and paying for college leads parents and children to assess and remake their responsibilities to each other. The bonds they establish and renew through this shared experience are intimate and personal. But family obligations are also, by necessity, mediated by the pressures of debt and promises of investment that parents and children use in an attempt to fulfill them. Indebted argues that the problem of paying for college today involves such profound moral, emotional, and economic commitments that it has, in fact, redefined the experience of being middle class.

This means that the public issue most often labeled “student debt” is far more encompassing than our conventional framing implies, and touches more parts of our lives than we usually consider. Middle-class families begin to face the problem of paying for college well before young adults sign their loan commitments. For parents, the worries often begin in the first days of a child’s life, if not sooner. Why? Because a college degree seems today to be the surest way to unlock the promises that the United States has made to the middle class.¹ Parents across the country wonder how they can best position their children for success in college. That means attending good schools from the very beginning, which means living in a good school district, which often means paying a high mortgage for housing. Even before their children apply to college, parents must spend enormous sums to prepare their offspring for higher education. And for a simple reason: Parents believe their children are worth the price.

In recent decades, the meaning of college has changed too. A four-year degree used to be something few needed to achieve; it is now essential for a foothold in the middle class. At the same time, the cost of college has spiked, levying a financial burden on families. This is why college and the debt it requires have become hot-button issues. Media headlines warn “Student Debt Is Crushing Millennials,” ask “Will Student Debt Sink the US Economy?” and declare “The Student Debt Bubble Is About to Pop,” all because the nature of our contemporary, financial economy has changed middle-class life.² But despite widespread awareness of the problem, the terms of the debate about what it means for families to be so indebted are too narrow.

Most commentators either decry the large quantity of student debt young adults carry or defend the American college finance system. Typically, critical accounts focus on how government policies, universities, and the financial industry have placed an undue burden on students and families. They draw on good evidence that the American system is causing considerable hardship for many families, and genuine distress for some. They also argue that debt loads are constraining the life choices of young adults after graduation—in some cases imperiling their financial security and that of their parents as well. And they often focus on for-profit universities and loan servicing companies that have exploited students and their families, generating massive revenues while offering a dubious quality of education and engaging in abusive practices.

I share these criticisms, and in this book I show how the system for financing higher education sets traps for students and their parents. I also identify the hardships that student debt so often inflicts. But this book is more than an argument against the system. At its core, it is about the largely unexplored ways that the financial economy has shaped the inner dynamics of American middle-class family life by forcing parents to confront the problem of paying for college.

Why do I focus on middle-class families? Because they are especially squeezed by the rising cost of college, and that has subjected them to a distinctive set of conflicting pressures. Middle-class families occupy a special place in the financial economy, because they have no choice but to use debt and investment in the attempt to achieve their aspirations. Sending young adults to college carries a unique significance for the middle class too, because striving to help children achieve a better life has long been one of the values and practices that makes a family middle class.

Countless definitions of the middle class circulate in the social sciences and popular culture, and reams of studies have shown that the great majority of American families consider themselves middle class. Here, however, I introduce a conception of middle-class life that is symptomatic of this economic moment. I define the middle class by their capacity to pay for college. I consider families to be middle class if the parents make too much money or have too much wealth for their children to qualify for major federal higher education grants, and if they earn too little or possess insufficient wealth to pay full fare at most colleges.

My emphasis is on how this imperative to secure financing has introduced a set of moral tensions into their lives—tensions between the sacred responsibilities that parents feel toward their children and the cultural expectations of fiscal prudence that financial advisers, lenders, and policy makers prescribe. On the one hand, parents are deeply committed to providing opportunities for their children to flourish, to pursue their dreams and fully develop their potential. College education is crucial to that project. On the other hand, both parents and young adults want to make good decisions about long-term economic security—their own as well as each others’. In the United States, these are moral imperatives as well as economic ones, and families voice the importance of both. The high cost of college, however, means that for middle-class families, figuring out how to honor both duties requires a challenging juggling act and causes a good deal of stress and conflict. In some cases, it leads to crisis.

Nearly every middle-class American family is wrestling with this problem. Yet most parents and students view their struggle to finance higher education as a personal and private problem, one that they must solve on their own. Few families connect their experience with those of their neighbors or fellow citizens around the country. That’s because family finances and the stresses caused by them are not generally considered topics to discuss openly and honestly outside of (or, often, even inside of) the home. The secret, unspoken nature of family financial situations means that we know little about how families cope with the strains, how and why they make the difficult decisions about their finances, and how they navigate the moral conflicts they face.

As middle-class families use investment and debt to fund college education, they encounter the financial system’s particular moral vision. Financial assessments and the terms of loans instruct families in how they should conduct their lives. That vision conflicts in a number of ways with families’ realities as well as with their deeply held values. Because the financial system wields power over middle-class families—they need the money, after all—these models of ideal behavior have teeth. Compliant families reap benefits; those who resist or don’t fit pay a price. The system’s moral imperatives are also characterized by internal contradictions, rendering even the most amenable families baffled at times. Too often it serves up blame rather than assistance and winds up injuring those it is supposed to help.

I launched an extensive study to learn about the hidden costs of student finance and to examine the lives of middle-class families who face the problem of paying for college. The project, which I describe in the pages that follow, led me to three main arguments about how financing education is influencing middle-class American family life. The first is that families’ lives are now organized in critical ways around the problem of paying for college. The second is that the system has introduced difficult moral conflicts for parents as they seek to honor what they see as their highest parental duty: providing their children with the opportunities that will allow them to fulfill their potential and pursue wide-open futures. The third is that middle-class families are being encouraged, if not required, to engage in what I call social speculation. By this I mean that the costs of college are now so high that both parents and students are forced to, in effect, place bets on whether or not they will be able to pay without jeopardizing their financial security and whether a college degree will, in fact, pay off.

Spending on college is speculative because parents cannot know for sure whether it will allow their children to pursue the open futures they want for them. Life is full of uncertainty. What sorts of opportunities will be available and whether students will be able to earn a comfortable living by pursuing their dreams are great unknowns. But parents and children must put money down—today—on the promise of the future. They draw down savings, invest, and take out debt based on hopeful visions that may or may not come to be, often for reasons beyond their control. Understanding how and why parents and their children place this bet requires not only answering the usual questions of public policy and economics but also recognizing the powerful cultural forces influencing family behavior.

What It Means to Be Middle Class

Parents and children engage in social speculation in large part because, in the contemporary American economy, getting a four-year college degree is the sine qua non of obtaining a middle-class life. Despite parents’ and children’s anxieties about the costs, for most middle-class children getting a college degree is a given, a necessity for remaining in the middle class or perhaps even reaching a higher economic station. This belief in the value of a college degree is backed up by economists’ data. So the commitment to college is in part economically pragmatic, a well-founded calculation—but only partly, because college has always been about more than the hope of achieving economic security.

Pursuing a college education fulfills crucial cultural mandates that being middle class requires. It demonstrates that family members subscribe to fundamental values that define middle-class life, especially committing to the next generation’s future. Middle-class parents believe that one of their principal responsibilities is to help their children become independent. Raising children who can take care of themselves and make decisions about their own well-being secures a family’s middle-class identity as much as it preserves the parents’ standard of living.

The historian Paula Fass has shown that American families have long subscribed to “the desirability and possibility of making children independent of their parents and giving them the tools to become so.”³ While parents might have little control over the world their children will launch into as they begin their adult lives, what they can do is prepare their children to handle—and, ideally, thrive in—whatever that future brings. This means cultivating children’s talents and moral capacities. Most importantly, it means developing their ability to adapt to the uncertainties they will face. Today, more than ever, higher education is essential for this project.

Paradoxically, families are also willing to pay high costs and take on debt because middle-class ethics demand that they be autonomous. Families should be independent, free from relying on government assistance or support from kin and friends. The high cost of college today means that middle-class parents and children must, in fact, rely on financial support from others. But the norms of middle-class culture mean that these others should be parts of the financial system: government, banks, and schools. Finance seems to preserve families’ ability to decide the best path for young adults’ education. Together, in private—because it’s culturally proscribed to discuss financial matters like income and wealth with friends and even with most relatives—the family selects where students should attend college and how much they’re willing to pay. This is crucial to what many parents described to me as their paramount duty to their children—providing them with the means to pursue an “open future.”

The concept of an open future is crucial for understanding why middle-class families invest so much in education. By “open future,” I mean one in which young adults are free to make themselves into the people they want to be. Fass shows that this is another long-standing cultural ideal, tracing it back to the American Revolution and its rejection of the norm that social position, and therefore one’s lot in life, must be inherited. American children wouldn’t be bound by that tradition; they would create a new world, casting aside the strictures of social hierarchy and reshaping society and the political system, governing both in accordance with the revolutionary vision. Children would be able to leave behind their social stations, overcome whatever educational and economic limits their family’s history might impose. This freedom to exercise their full potential would be the foundation of an empowered democratic citizenry. For centuries, assuring that children are prepared for this pursuit has been the sacred role of American parents. Although many Americans did not then—and do not now—have the resources to assure this opportunity for their children, the parents I interviewed in my study revealed that the belief in their responsibility to provide it, and their desire to meet that obligation, remains strong.

Education holds a special place in this American ethic of opportunity not only because it is the most powerful means by which children can invent themselves and build their open futures. Higher education also provides a forum for rising generations to coalesce around new ideas and develop novel ways of being together. In colleges and universities, young adults define and redefine their values and views, sometimes affirming and sometimes breaking from those of their elders. This is how, and where, young middle-class adults build a vision for tomorrow. The philosopher John Dewey argued that this is a key reason schools are a linchpin of democracy. They can facilitate interaction with people across cultural and economic lines that so often divide us, challenging those with different beliefs and traditions to engage with each other, cultivating citizens who are able to keep learning and change their minds. All of this, Dewey insisted, is vital to a healthy democracy, because a...