Financial aid and mental freedom
Deep Thought Shouldn’t Be a Luxury Good
The Chronicle of Higher Education | July 2, 2018
There’s a lot to unpack in Educated, Tara Westover’s best-selling memoir about growing up in a cultish Idaho family.
Homeschooled in little more than amateur herbology and survivalist lore, Westover’s curiosity and cussedness take her to Brigham Young University and onward to Cambridge and Harvard. Her tale has the pacing of a thriller but emerges as an earnest meditation on the power of learning to liberate both mind and soul.
"Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind," she writes.
Before we come to purchasing privileges and constructing minds, though, Westover has to surmount more mundane challenges: paying tuition, buying books, and making rent. Educated is a soaring reflection of higher education’s best ideals, but it also offers one of the starkest financial-aid testimonials I’ve ever read.
After spending several semesters resisting government charity — survivalists do not appreciate intrusive financial-aid forms — Westover finally reaches the point of selling her plasma and scouring her apartment for things to pawn. After relentless cajoling from a patient bishop, an exasperated roommate, and an aching tooth she can’t afford to repair, Westover finally fills out her aid application.
The result is worth quoting at length:
"I had a thousand dollars in my bank account. It felt strange just to think that, let alone say it. A thousand dollars. Extra. That I did not immediately need. It took weeks for me to come to terms with this fact, but as I did, I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.
"My professors came into focus, suddenly and sharply; it was as if before the grant I’d been looking at them through a blurred lens. My textbooks began to make sense, and I found myself doing more than the required reading."
Deep thought, Westover discovers, is a luxury good. Having a thousand extra dollars didn’t make her any smarter or more driven. But it bought the mental space for that talent to surface.
Those of us in the financial-aid field witness this reality all the time. The goal of effective aid isn’t just to cover the bare minimum college costs, but to give low-income students the freedom to be students.
There’s a growing body of research that reveals poverty as a kind of mental tax. The cognitive burden of day-to-day rationing crowds out room for deep reading, reflection, creativity, social engagement — all the things that successful students are supposed to be doing with their time in college.
The poor must manage sporadic income, juggle expenses, and make difficult tradeoffs," wrote a quartet of economics and psychology researchers in a 2013 study in the journal Science. "Even when not actually making a financial decision, these preoccupations can be present and distracting."
Westover’s memoir vividly illustrates that theoretical point. As overdue bills pile up, it’s not just the exhaustion of multiple jobs and strained family ties that weigh on her. It’s the loss of appetite for her studies, the cooling of the intellectual fire that drove her to college in the first place.
"I was an incurious student that semester," Westover writes. "I submitted my homework and studied for my exams, but I did so out of terror — of losing my scholarship should my GPA fall a single decimal — not from any real interest in my classes."
This extraordinary scholar, a woman who willed her way from a fundamentalist compound to a Cambridge doctorate, was nearly undone by the stress of an overdrawn bank account.
Much of the dialogue around poor students in higher education centers on long-term deficits and barriers — structural obstacles like low-performing public schools, fewer books in the household, fewer extracurricular opportunities. It makes for a bleak picture, a litany of past wrongs we can’t correct. It suggests a certain inevitability about lagging graduation rates or lower GPAs among needy students.
We should pay closer attention to immediate financial stress as an academic handicap — and a fixable problem. Remove the day-to-day mental burden of an empty checking account, and those supposedly intractable achievement gaps will prove much easier to tackle.
Doing that will take resources, of course. The rigid structure of most aid programs leaves campus officials with little discretion to tackle the minor crises that can derail even the best-prepared students — like Westover’s much-delayed root canal. Giving aid offices more flexibility with existing state and federal funds would be a fine start.
Even in the absence of increased funding, there are steps colleges can take to minimize financial uncertainty. Advertise emergency grant programs — the knowledge of their existence can be helpful even to students who don’t use them. Keep an open door to students who might need aid adjustments or budgeting advice. And set a cost-of-attendance that’s more than a bare-bones budget of direct expenses.
One of the most common pieces of financial advice — dispensed by everyone from Dave Ramsey to the Federal Reserve — is to keep a pool of rainy-day savings. What Westover’s story teaches us, and what so much research now confirms, is that the real value of extra money isn’t in covering emergencies, but in buying everyday reassurance.
If we’re serious about closing the gap between poor students and their peers, we can afford that vital privilege.
Eric Johnson works for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education: chronicle.com/article/Deep-Thought-Shouldn-t-Have/243813