Alternative Economic Privilege

Underlying any class-conscious conversations I have with my friends at Grinnell is our economic unity: we are all attending an elite liberal arts college. Because of this common factor, our conversations rarely acknowledge the fact that many people do not have the ability to attend school at all.

Luckily, Grinnell is a little different from most institutions of higher education in the United States. Not only does it accept students from some of the most economically diverse backgrounds, but it also awards students generous scholarships that allow many of us to leave here with far less debt than our peers. Though I am fundamentally opposed to the price tags on a modern undergraduate education, I am truly grateful to attend a college that does not exploit its students for every penny of debt that it can squeeze out of them.

One of the reasons I love Grinnell is that it cultivates a community where students are insatiably curious and eager to share what we observe. Our tight-knit community encourages students to recognize the privileges and disadvantages at work in our own lives so that we can more readily recognize and celebrate the diversity of others.

Grinnellians are good at reminding me to consider my own background before making assumptions about others’. I sometimes feel embarrassed that I have the immense privilege to attend college in the first place, let alone a college with such a stellar commitment to scholarship as Grinnell. Other times, I fail to recognize that some students have the ability to fully pay for school, or are expected to do so. Examining my own opportunities for mobility has led me to ask a question that I cannot easily answer: Do I have economic privilege?

My parents both went to college; I am not a first-generation or even a second-generation student. However, neither of my parents chose to fully enter the traditional job market, instead creating niches for themselves in the arts community they discovered in Lawrence, Kan. My family’s diversion from the traditional path of American economic mobility developed further as we began to grow all of our own vegetables and grains, planting and storing them locally. Our way of life became less and less like my peers’ when my parents designed and built a wood-stove-heated, highly energy-efficient home in a rural area just north of Lawrence, where we collect rainwater and raise our own livestock for food.

Despite the fact that I was raised on almost fully homegrown meals, there were a few times when my family was unsure if we could pay for gas that week or buy something I needed at school. My brother and I knew there was a possibility that we would not be getting a check in the mail for the jewelry my mother made, or for the intermittent woodcarving, home design, or letterpress work my dad found. But despite our occasional financial challenges, my parents have sent both of us to college. Privilege is more complex than the relationship between a paycheck, food on the table, and school fees, it seems.

Furthermore, my parents did not send me to school with the ultimatum to find a job after graduation. In the modern jobs discourse, parents spend their time thinking about how to best raise and position their children so they will be attractive to the person or entity that will pay them for work, rather than cultivating interests and skills that may be useful in simple living, such as growing food and fixing things. This is my economic quandary: My parents raised me with more emphasis on skills for simple living and the cultivation of creative interests; and yet here I am getting a degree in political science at an elite school, already distant from the life most people on this planet lead.

Among my peers at Grinnell, I constantly struggle to assert how alternative my home life is, while questioning just how alternative I can be when coming from an educationally privileged background. Luckily, I have become part of a community of creative and inquisitive students who regularly use newfound awareness to place our lives in concert with the shifting world around us. Grinnell’s social justice perspective gives us the ability to go beyond the question of why things are the way they are — we demand why things haven’t changed yet. Taking it a step further, Grinnell often challenges us to be the ones to change them.

Regardless of where I fit into the economic or social categories of my generation, I will always be thankful that my education at Grinnell gives me the power to first recognize those categories, and now develop the power to change them when they are unjust.