My last piece was a response to the “OSAP Diet” experiment, as undertaken by the OUSA. On first pass I was underwhelmed by the idea. Living on $7.50/day for food doesn’t seem too radical to me. But unexpectedly I find the project has become very interesting. It’s demonstrating that students are shockingly ignorant about budgeting, food costs, and the world as it appears to anyone paying their own bills.
The Varsity ran a piece in their current issue, taking students’ reactions to the campaign. I’d love to link directly to the article in the paper but I think this content doesn’t make it to their website. If anyone can find it, somewhere, please let me know. In the meanwhile, I’ll simply say that six students at random were stopped on campus and questioned on the topic, including their own budgets and spending habits. The article comes with first names and photos, but I’ll omit them for now. Let’s just say I’m protecting the ludicrous. Their comments are as follows:
This is a sample group of six. Probably not enough to draw elaborate conclusions from. But I’ll make some preliminary observations and then I’ll suggest that I’d love to learn more and in fact I think this experiment could have wide implications for our approach to education.
First, we’ve got the $5 coffee again. Someone needs to find whoever it is at Starbucks who managed to redefine their elaborate concoctions as reasonable daily beverage purchases and give that person an award. But leaving aside the one rhetorical point, many students seem to classify daily retail food purchases as part of a standard, baseline budget. Some simply assume that every meal must cost whatever a restaurant is charging. The difference between eating on a budget and splurging on a meal is, apparently, the distinction between MacDonald’s and sushi. And that’s just insane.
Second, most students fail at cooking and have no sense at all of how to shop. For the ones who live at home with parents this may be considered normal, perhaps. But even so, you might expect they’d know the difference between grocery shopping on a budget and not. I hate to sound like an old guy here, grumbling stupidly about “kids today,” but when I was a kid my mother took me grocery shopping. And she showed me how to find cheaper stuff and things on sale. Hell, we even bought dented cans sometimes. I’m not saying every student needs to go that far and in fact we often didn’t. But at least I learned the difference.
Third, the lowest estimate we seen to get for a single adult’s food budget is approximately $450/month. I don’t want to repeat things I wrote last piece, but do these students even know what people are living on who depend on public assistance? How can they act outraged at this travesty of a budget they’ve been stuck with (significantly subsidized at public expense) when their own assumptions imply that we’re literally starving our most vulnerable citizens to death? Maybe they haven’t added one plus one here, but it seems amazing if they haven’t.
Finally, there’s a wider trend that I wish to address. This is the issue that has the greatest implication for our system as a whole. These students aren’t really commenting on what it takes to live. They’re commenting on what it takes to live well. And they expect to live well. It goes along with their image of themselves as young professionals but also with a sense of lifestyle entitlement. It isn’t a bad thing to want to live well. Those with the income to support it are welcome to live as well as they like. But all these expectations add up. Almost $500 per month for food. And how much for an apartment? I guarantee we aren’t talking about basement bachelors here. Entertainment? Clothes? Vehicle on top of that? We’re starting to get a pretty big bill going — certainly not what most people can afford on a starting salary.
I’ve long preached against the dangers of going straight into post-secondary education, or moving from undergrad straight into graduate study, simply because you don’t know what else to do with yourself. Take that plunge when you aren’t ready and you may find you close all sorts of doors for the future. But wait until you are ready and you’ll make the most of your education and have options when you’re done. I’ve always approached this issue as though students are making this mistake simply because they don’t know what else to do and feel they must be in school. Now I realize there’s an alternative explanation.
Many students really don’t understand that you can live on $10/hour. The thought of taking some time off high school just to work and figure things out isn’t only alien to them but the budget of this life seems impossible and unsupportable. So they’ve got to enter university if only to keep feeding their $5 coffee habits. Then many students upon graduation find even the $35-40k you might earn with a bachelors degree to be unreasonable and unlivable. It’s the condo lifestyle or nothing. So for those who have the option it’s on to graduate and professional school. Not for any of the many potential good reasons — only because no one ever taught them how to live on less than a professional salary.
If we want people to make the most of their educational opportunities — and it’s only sound public policy that we should — we need to begin incorporating the idea that for any particular student there may indeed be a right time and a wrong time to benefit fully from the experience. As stands, many students seem unable to even approach this decision as a choice at all, simply because of their shocking ignorance regarding how to live on a budget. This is a real problem! Our failure to educate students in this one basic way may be interfering with their ability to learn almost everything else fully.
Okay. Rant off. But with one final observation. $5/day for a “coffee,” every day, adds up to $150/month. That’s a significant chunk of any student loan. Anyone with a habit like that, outside of the independently wealthy, might consider investing in a thermos and taking something from home. Whether your real food budget is $7.50/day or not, if you are taking on debt to pay for school at the same time, you really might want to question whether your Starbucks habit is really worth taking out a larger loan. Because that, in effect, is what’s really happening.
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