Most people would generally consider a student getting money from his or her parents while in college to be a good thingβafter all, most traditional-age college students tend to have few resources of their own and additional money from Mom and Dad might help students work fewer hours generally considered a good thing. But a new paper in the American Sociological Review by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California-Merced, challenges this assumption.
As a sociologist, Hamilton came to the project with the perspective that more financial resources are a good thing for a student due to the mere availability of resources and social capital. But I am also concerned that no-strings-attached gifts from parents might not be a good thing, since they may lack the performance requirements of merit-based financial aid.
Additionally, the need for additional funds might reflect the inability of a student from a middle- to upper-income family to secure merit-based aid.
Because of that, she uses the BPS to look at graduation rates. My biggest concern with the article is that appears that more help from the parents allows some marginal students to stay in school who otherwise would not have appeared in the dataset. If some of the 2. Because of this, I have to take the finding on GPAs with a grain of salt. On another note, this article also can teach scholars quite a bit about how to interact with the media.
While the media should run more reasonable headlines, it is the responsibility of academics to call out the education press when they play these sorts of games. One of the factors which attracted me to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school was the Wisconsin Idea βthe belief that the boundaries of the university should be the boundaries of the state.
