The real stakes of financial aid

Making it easier to pay for a Duke education would help shoo away Duke’s cult of money. That would be good for all of us.

It’s hard to argue that a socioeconomically diverse student body isn’t a good thing. But why, exactly? We’ve been raised to believe that “diversity” is in general something we want around us on campus and elsewhere, which is not a bad thing to have absorbed, as far as unconscious beliefs go. If a Duke student would rather be attending Oxford during the reign of George V, he/she probably knows to keep his/her mouth shut. Despite what I’ve been hearing in my classes, talking like a “Downton Abbey” character isn’t actually socially acceptable. I hope.

But where socioeconomic diversity is concerned, Duke has something more at stake than self-satisfaction.

Full disclosure: Like over 50 percent of Duke students, I receive financial aid. I went to a high school in Wyoming that didn’t have such a thing as rich kids. At Duke, there’s a widespread belief that any job that doesn’t require you to pay close attention to what kind of tie you wear is a radically subversive life choice. Back on the ranch, no one told us you could make $150,000 your first year out of college for nothing more than, in the words of a former private equity guy I know, “making mathematical models that confirm the unfounded assumptions of my superiors.” OK, so I didn’t grow up on a ranch, but admit that I had you for a second.

That’s why I’ve always been taken aback by some of the neuroses I’ve seen here. “I need to do [lucrative kind of work shilled by the Career Center] because I have to pay off my loans” is hard to argue with—the United States’ student loan system is a scandal. More on that later. But if you’re not saddled with serious debt, and you’re not really that into finance or consulting or Excel, why do you want to do those things for 80 hours per week? You tell me. When jobs come up in conversation here, I feel like I’m from a different planet where we don’t believe that the poverty line begins just below $65,000 per year.

There’s no ghostly Obi-wan Kenobi hovering around me telling me to shy away from jobs that I don’t want to do—I’m just the victim of an upbringing in which not everyone around me was—or strived to be—of the same socioeconomic status. Duke students are a fairly diverse bunch on paper. But our neurotic desire for a high income unites us, and not for the better. When we lack imagination or confidence, the way we look at money usually lurks nearby. If the anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered over the past four years proves anything, it’s that worrying about staying in the same high tax bracket as your parents can feel just as imprisoning as badly wanting to be richer than you were growing up. The kids who fear a life that doesn’t include a car service have a lot to learn from the kids who don’t.

So, we need to work to build a campus that isn’t just socioeconomically diverse, but is also a place where students of all levels of wealth don’t feel like their post-grad opportunities are shackled by economic anxieties. That’s the best case for making Duke’s financial aid system more navigable (a need discussed in detail in the recently released Socioeconomic Diversity Initiative report) and for replacing loans with grants in aid packages, something pioneered by Princeton and since adopted by a few other schools. The average loan debt for a member of the Class of 2010 was $21,884, and anything we can do to drive that number down helps. And while it (sadly) comes across as naive to suggest that Duke consider lowering tuition, we could try not raising it every year—a Duke education already costs nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

A Duke that did a better job easing students’ money anxieties would not just be a more generous University; it would also be a University whose students obsessed less about making as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Who knows? Maybe we could dust off that old language about “following your passions.” But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.