Parenting

I grew up in a community where there was a default presumption that parents would help their kids pay for college expenses, if they could afford it. Now, of course, many can't afford it, and many could afford only part of it, and many could afford all of it but also decide that there's value--some important lesson learned--in having the child work or even take on debt of their own to help pay for college. And there are some exceptions to this--parents who can afford to pay and realize that it's in the child's interests if the parents pay, but who don't want to pay anyway. Or they will pay, but only for the least-expensive option (e.g., the local public university). But the point remains that in general there appears to be a presumption in my community--and, I would generalize, in most of the US--that if you can afford to pay for your kid's college education, or part of it, you will do so.

Here, there is no such presumption, apparently. Kids move out of the house very young. It's not uncommon to have them move out at about 16, in fact. And they are expected to pay the costs of university.

That's not as bad as it would be in the US, because the financial burden isn't as significant. First, tuition is much cheaper (and there are no private universities, and the most recent election featured a proposal to make all student loans interest-free); second, the norm is just to go to university in your hometown, rather than to travel to where you might get the best education; and, third, students often--though certainly not always--live at home (rent-free) during one or more of their years at university.

So I tried testing the intuition of locals (one Aussie parent and one childless Kiwi) regarding what I take to be the most compelling case for the way things are done back home. The argument was this: the parent's responsibility is to give the child the (available) toolkit they will need for a flourishing life; that toolkit is not complete until after higher education; thus, the parent's responsibility is to give the child a higher education (when the means to do so are available).

I also ran a secondary argument that the maturity to fend for yourself in a fully adequate way doesn't come until after university.

I buy my friends' reaction to the secondary argument: the only reason US students aren't fully mature in terms of fending for themselves until after (well after?!) university is because they aren't forced to. That is, if they were on their own at an earlier age, they'd be more mature at an earlier age. This strikes me as plausible, in the same way that it's plausible that the French don't have a higher proportion of winos simply because kids drink wine at a relatively early age.

But I didn't get what I thought was good response to the main argument. Of course, it might be rare that the burden of paying for university, living at home during university here, or going to a local university has resulted in a stunted toolkit, but I can't help thinking that there's at least a little bit of parental responsibility being shirked in not accepting the presumption that you'll help with your child's higher education if you have the available means.

One side-note: my interlocutors in this conversation did concede that they would try to help if their child got into Oxford or Princeton or some such, but they also noted that they'd basically have no means for doing so, and that the child would have to get some other form of financial aid. But our conversation was mostly confined to domestic university opportunities. The move to international education, for those Kiwis who pursue it, usually happens at the post-graduate level, not at the undergraduate level.

Another side-note: attending university isn't as financially important as it is in the US. Here, for instance, farming is a very lucrative and high-prestige industry. Much more lucrative than a career in higher education!