Economists have never settled on a definition of what makes an American family “middle class,” often employing calculations involving a family’s median household income, wealth, or consumption.
But Caitlin Zaloom uses a simpler measure: Can the family afford college for its children?
Zaloom’s new book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost (Princeton University Press), is an ethnographic examination of how students and families talk and think about paying for college. An associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, Zaloom spoke with 80 sets of students and parents across the nation — and conducted another 80 interviews with either a student or a parent — for the book.
The patterns she found — parents and students alike worrying about being a burden in the college-financing process, a financial-aid system founded on outdated models of nuclear families — led to an argument in Indebted that the financial, interpersonal, and moral repercussions of underwriting a college education are redefining familial relationships and socioeconomic boundaries. It’s a topic that holds particular resonance as 2020 presidential candidates bandy about proposals for free college and student-debt refinancing.
Zaloom spoke with The Chronicle about the process of writing Indebted, how it influenced her work as a faculty member, and the trap of financial responsibility.
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Can you talk about the role higher education plays in defining social class in the U.S.?
The middle class has always defined itself by the ability to open up opportunities for children, and today there is no institution more important in that effort than college. I define the middle class by its ability to achieve college education for children. And that means focusing on the debt that most Americans face as they try to achieve this essential middle-class goal.
One of the difficulties in researching this book, you wrote, was that family finance is such a taboo topic. As you put it, “Americans will sooner talk to you about their sex lives than their salaries, the adage goes, and the same is true for their accounts.” So what role should higher-education institutions play in starting those conversations?
One of the most surprising issues I found for middle-class families was that many, even most, did not want their children to grasp how much stress paying for college was placing on their families.
The origin of that silence is deeply rooted in families’ values around what higher education means to them. So the biggest thing that colleges can do is to lower the stress of sending children to higher education, and that means lowering the cost. Now, our most important lever for achieving this is by funding our public colleges well enough so that they don’t have to rely as heavily on tuition dollars from families. So lowering costs has to come first.
There are other ways that families can break this silence. They can consider a broad set of postsecondary options for their children. Of course, what I heard was that parents were actually already doing that to a large degree, in part because many families have multiple children. So the decision is never one that is happening in isolation. It’s always happening as part of the family. And so different kids look at different schools, and parents know that their public colleges are a good option, oftentimes the best option. But we’ve also spent many decades sending a message to parents that private is generally better. Unfortunately, the sticker price of a college can be conflated with its value. This is not a crazy equation to draw if you’re a parent, but it’s something that we have to work against actively.
You teach at NYU, which is one of the most expensive universities in the country. How did that play into writing this book?
One of the reasons I wrote the book was because my students at NYU brought their stress to me. They brought to me just how difficult their family lives were with the challenge of paying for the education I was invested in giving them. Teaching at NYU — a very expensive university in a very expensive city — meant that I saw some extreme cases of this stress. One of the reasons that I went beyond NYU to talk to families around the country was that I understood that the NYU experience didn’t necessarily reflect what was happening for families across the country.
So I concentrated a set of interviews in the state of Michigan, which has some of the strongest colleges in the country. All of the Michigan schools have given students and their families in that state good options. But what I found in Michigan was not that different from what I found in other places. Michigan has had a deteriorating economy for decades, one which imposes incredible uncertainty on many, many families. The uncertainty in their work lives and the volatility in their incomes meant that facing down the cost of college, even at Michigan’s public universities, was often enough to stress families in ways that were a concern to both parents and students.
Has writing Indebted changed how you teach?
Yes. I’m very sensitive now to how the financial condition of families affects what happens in the classroom. One issue that I see continually in my own work is that students have to work many, many hours, as well as to study and balance work. It puts students under pressure when they are also trying to do what we need them to do, which is to learn. They have to go to work instead of studying. They have to go to work at times when they should be devoting extra attention to their research and writing. That financial pressure students are under shapes what can happen in the classroom and in our instruction.
One of Indebted ’s themes is that higher ed is increasingly being seen as a financial investment for families, as opposed to an environment for students to learn and grow. Do you find that dichotomy troubling?
We need to refocus our understanding of education on the more important goal of helping students understand who they want to be in the world and how they want to contribute. That is a different goal than giving them a credential that will allow them to to get a high-paying job. I talk to them explicitly about that tension. And I know that they are under enormous pressure to get jobs that will allow them to pay their debts. We’ve seen in recent research from the National Bureau of Economic Research that students with debt tend to accept higher-paying jobs and have lower job satisfaction. And that finding is just the tip of the iceberg.
We should not be burdening them with debts that drive their job choices in ways that essentially make them yeoman workers of the corporate economy, rather than bringing their talents, their skills, and their desires to their jobs and to their communities.
You explore the student financial complex as a moral entity. Tell me about that.
It’s very important to understand that these financial responsibilities we’ve given parents and students since the ’80s are a moral weight. It is not simply a tactical fix. That is how it’s too often portrayed.
Parents and students both feel a real commitment that goes beyond, say, simply balancing their books. In order to be good parents, they described needing to spend, in effect, enormous sums of money. They needed to buy a home or rent a place in a good school district, which often means stretching their budget. They needed to pay for sports and arts lessons that would both give their children an expanded education and experience in the world, but would also give them the tools of self-discipline that they would use in pursuing higher education. So these are two conflicting ideas. On the one hand, they are supposed to be, for instance, saving for college and for their retirement. On the other hand, they’re supposed to be spending everything they’ve got on their children’s futures.
It’s a tough situation for parents.
It’s certainly a trap. And it’s one that we’ve built through our public policies.
What needs to change first in the way we approach paying for college?
We have to address the fundamental problem, and that is the cost of higher education. And the best way to do that is by funding public colleges well enough so that they can lower the cost to low, or no, tuition. Families will still then face the room-and-board costs. And so, in addition to increasing our funding for public colleges, we also need a functional debt system at the federal level, which doesn’t punish graduates — and even worse, students who haven’t finished their degrees — by requiring them to repay during the most vulnerable decade of their lives, the years following their college experience.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
