Obies Occupying Wall Street: Check Your Privilege

26th October 2011

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Obies Occupying Wall Street: Check Your Privilege

I haven’t posted much about Occupy Wall Street, because far too many people have been saying far too many things better than I could. (For the record, my opinion aligns generally with Jay Smooth’s.) But this article hit close to home, and it made me really angry. So — hey, Oberlin kids, let’s have a chat…

Here’s the deal. We go to a school that costs $55,000 a year. Overall, almost two-thirds of our student body receives need-based aid[1] — including some students with family incomes over $150,000, who received an average of nearly $16,000 per year in aid[2]. These awards are intended to cover 100% of financial need. In addition, many students who would not be eligible for need-based aid receive merit scholarships.

I don’t believe that Oberlin’s financial aid system is perfect. The point I want to make is this: nearly one-third of Oberlin students don’t receive need-based aid, generally because they, their families, or the financial aid office have determined that they don’t need aid in order to cover $55,000 per year. Many, if not most, of this one-third have their tuition paid by their families. This includes Daniel Rosenfeld, Max Zahn, and me. I’d guess that our parents are easily in the top 5% of household incomes in the U.S. To make a literal statement about income distribution, many Oberlin students are the 1% — or at least the 2% or the 3% or the 5%, which in society as it stands is close enough. These are the students I’m talking about and to in this post.

What does this mean? It means that our families could afford to send us to pretty much any college in the world. Since we were good enough to get into Oberlin, it probably also means that we could have gotten hefty scholarships, or even free rides, at less competitive schools. And since we’re at Oberlin, it means that we have an incredible number of educational opportunities, resources, support systems, and alumni connections at our disposal. This is privilege. These are opportunities that the vast majority of people in this country do not have.

So it’s staggering to read things like this (emphases mine):

“Did we all just spend $200,000 for a piece of paper?” asked Rosenfeld, who started college at the beginning of the economic collapse and remains highly skeptical that his chances for finding a decent job will necessarily improve come graduation day. “And even with these degrees, our parents are still going to need to support us through an endless series of unpaid internships.”

Or this:

“We’re about to graduate from a ridiculously expensive liberal arts college and people aren’t even talking about getting jobs they’re so desperate,” said Rosenfeld. “I see most of us moving back in with our parents, at least in the short term — and possibly for a lot longer than I can even wrap my mind around.”

I get the impulse to despair. I’m also graduating this year. The economy ain’t great. The job market sucks. Even for people with college degrees, the outlook isn’t pretty[3] — although it’s still dramatically better than it is for people with no degree at all[4]. So I can understand this, to a point. But I sure as hell can’t empathize with it.

To misappropriate Jon Stewart’s words: “You have a choice. You went to Oberlin.” So what choices did you make? Did you take the opportunities you were given — Winter Terms, service learning courses, college grants, alumni networks? Did you work with your advisors and mentors to construct a meaningful course of education, so your degree won’t be just a fancy piece of paper? While your parents paid your tuition, did you work anyway so you’d have seed money after graduation? (Do you have any idea how many people wish that they could fall back on their parents; how many people have parents that rely on them instead?)

Maybe you chose to major in a liberal arts field, and find that you’re about to graduate without a clear career path. As a Classics and Archaeology major, I can’t fault anyone for that. But did you think about that choice — what it means for your future, and what it means that you had the ability to do that in the first place?

Or did you come to Oberlin because it was cheap (for you) and easy, and then expect that life after graduation would be cheap and easy as well?

Frankly, when Daniel Rosenfeld says “people aren’t even talking about getting jobs”, I just don’t know which people he’s talking about. The Oberlin seniors that I know aren’t resigning ourselves to failure now, in October, a whopping seven months before graduation. We’re busting our asses trying to parlay the opportunities that we have into careers that live up to our principles and allow us to give things back, even if it also means giving things up. We’re trying to find ways to make real change after we graduate, inside or outside the system. We’re grateful for the safety nets that we have, but we’re damn well doing our best not to rely on them. And we’re acknowledging the privilege that allows us to make these choices. We’re not trekking out to Zuccotti Park over fall break to protest that all the gifts we’ve been given just aren’t enough.

I am far from the first person to make this point. But since it doesn’t seem to be sinking in, I’ll say it again, from one whiny rich kid to another: check your privilege. Get some perspective. Use the opportunities you’ve been given. And if you’re going to take a vacation to Occupy Wall Street, make it about the people who are really struggling and can’t afford to go protest, not about you.

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Obies Occupying Wall Street: Check Your Privilege