The Shreveport Times runs "The Color of Money" by Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary. Today's column was about financing for college and contained excerpts from a conversation with Joseph Hurley, author of
This was one of the questions Singletary asked: "When applying or need-based financial aid, I know that institutions look at both parental and child resources. Do you know whether a 529 savings account would count against a family? It seems like a disincentive. The families who don't save will ultimately get more (free) need-based aid as they have no savings and are needier."
I read this column in today's paper edition of The Times, but I couldn't find it on the website. I found it at washingtonpost.com, but it requires registration, and since I refuse to do that, I certainly won't recommend it to you.
Commentary
I didn't read the response to Singletary's question, because I was too floored by the question itself. Also, I finished college long ago and have no children. Anyway, here's how I read the question: "should people who can afford to save for college neglect to do so in order to be in a better position to compete with people who are unable to save for college for the limited resource that is government aid?" Shorter version: "what exactly do people need to do to ensure that they 'get theirs' from the government?"
I don't want to single (hee!) Singletary out for my incredulity here. Lots of financial journalists write about similar issues: how can I keep Medicare from taking my home when I go into a nursing home; how do I provide my grandchildren with an inheritance that won't count against their SSDI (full disclosure: members of my family have taken advantage of that one); etc. It has become commonplace for us to think of programs that were originally developed as safety nets as being entitlements. We paid into these funds with our taxes, the reasoning goes, we should be able to take what we want from them. Or sometimes just, "they exist, so we should be able to take what we want from them."
Peter G. Peterson has a lot of interesting things to say about how we came to this state of affairs in his book Running on Empty. In it, he lays blame pretty equally on both liberals and conservatives, but Democrats are singled out for believing that social programs that both exist on a need-based basis are not politically viable because nobody will support government aid they don't personally benefit from. From my perspective, they're wrong. I believe self-sufficiency is its own reward. I remember when I first started working after graduating from college, I used to have so much fun paying my bills. "Woo-hoo! I earned this money, now I can pay for my own air conditioning!" I lived in Houston; air conditioning was far and away my biggest expense. I won't say that I'm still that enthusiastic; twenty years of paying your own way calms one down a bit.
The attitude Singletary is inquiring about (I won't claim she has it herself) brings to mind my favorite parable: the one about the workers being hired to work the field throughout the day (Matthew 20:1-15). When I teach kids about this parable I tell them there's something else going on besides God rewarding whom He chooses. The people who start working in the field early, i.e. the people who don't wait until they're about to die to serve God, get an extra reward: they get to serve God longer! People who can afford to save for college tuition for their children get a reward that's far better than free money: they get to put their children through college! What could be a better fulfillment of the American dream than that?
Please understand, generally-available government services are another story. I think everybody should use their public libraries, schools and roads. And if we had a tax system that supported universal higher education, public nursing homes, and single-payer health care, I would expect everyone to take advantage of those as well, because they would be designed for everyone's use. But need-based financial aid for college should be just that: need-based. If you don't need it, you shouldn't be thinking about how you can take advantage of it anyway.
What did you see today?
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