Step 1: Stop feeling ashamed for getting robbed
In a classroom of more than 100 students, all but three of us had raised our hands. I just prayed to whatever higher power might be out there that no one had noticed that I was one of those three.
My college economics professor was trying to humble his class. He first asked for all students who considered themselves “middle class” to raise their hands. After nearly everyone did – including me, he told us to put down our hands because he had another question.
“How many of your parents make more than a million dollars a year?”
To scattered gasps, a few students raised their hands. The professor told them to keep their hands up and then asked how many parents made half a million. More hands went up.
Those were joined by more hands at $200,000 and at $100,000, by which time the majority of the class had raised their hands. Asks for $60,000 and $30,000 drew up all but the last three hands. This was the fall of 1985, when the median U.S. household income was just under $30,000.
His point was that the students at Northwestern University were economically privileged. We were not as “middle class” as we believed ourselves to be. But not all of us shared that privilege.
On campuses across America, you will find student groups chartered to serve Black students, Jewish students, Latino students, Asian students, and even first-generation college students. But I have yet to find a college or university that sponsors a “Poor Students’ Union.”
Yes, needy students get financial aid. Yet my meager federal Pell Grant hardly dented the bill Northwestern charged. The university provided grants of its own, but I still left school thousands of dollars in debt. (Today, Northwestern no longer requires needy students to take out federal student loans to attend.)
Financial aid might have helped cover the cost of tuition and a dorm room, but it did not put anywhere near the same amount of money in my pockets that my classmates had. Not having money shapes your thinking as powerfully as any top university class. It teaches you rule out opportunities and avoid risks that other people, with more money, can afford to embrace.
My background did not prevent me from applying to and getting into a school like Northwestern. It did not keep me from getting elected student government vice president my freshman year and being invited to serve along faculty members on several top university committees. Being poorer than almost everyone else at my school was just my dirty secret, to be kept from others. My need to keep that secret isolated me and kept me from building relationships with the people that could have helped me professionally and personally throughout my life.
It kept me from helping my classmates, too – by showing them an example that might challenge some of their beliefs about poor and working class people. All those other student unions exist in part to teach their members that there is value in their unique experiences – not just for themselves, but for the people and communities around them, as well.
There is no single reason why people struggle with money. Divorce, death, addiction, disease, violence, and accidents can send a family into generational poverty. So can economic exploitation. My parents worked, as do the parents of countless poor and middle class children in America today. They work, but they do not enjoy the full value of that work. The gap between productivity and the average worker’s earnings has been growing ever since the 1970s. [Source] Over the past half century, workers have collected just one third of the extra value that they have delivered to their employers.
Over the same time, the prices of housing, health care, and education have soared, leaving more and more Americans frustrated, despondent, and angry. Yet – just as I did in that college classroom decades ago – people continue to see poverty as a personal failure. Those of us without money feel ashamed of that.
And that shame allows the people stealing the value of our work to keep getting away with it.