A Lot of (White) Millennials Get Significant Financial Help From Their Parents
LatestOne of my least favorite things in the world is hearing a young person whose parents pay their cell phone/buy them plane tickets home for every holiday/give them thousand-dollar gift checks say something like, “I’ve never gotten any help from my parents, but I’ve managed to save some money.” Not because it’s bad to get any of those things, but because it’s bad not to recognize: Informal help is help. As this Atlantic piece by Mel Jones delineates in a dozen different ways, informal help is meaningful, and accumulates over time: altering decision processes, saving its recipients from trade-offs and time sucks, creating the class differences in America we know and love.
As you may or may not have noticed from experience (just kidding, you’ve noticed), the hesitation to admit informal advantage tends to come hand-in-hand with that informal advantage, which tends to come hand-in-hand with being white:
A seminal study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives on wealth accumulation estimates that as much as 20 percent of wealth can be attributed to formal and informal gifts from family members, especially parents. And it starts early. In college, black and Hispanic Millennials are more likely to have to work one or two jobs to get through, missing out on opportunities to connect with classmates who have time to tinker around in dorm rooms and go on to found multibillion-dollar companies together. Many of them take on higher levels of student debt than their white peers, often to pay for routine expenses, such as textbooks, that their parents are less likely to subsidize.
College is where these separations seep in and sometimes become chasmic. Ten years ago, though I was supported very generously by a scholarship at UVA, I remember being so frustrated by having to spend my side-job money on basic things like transit or storage or security deposits, rather than on other things that might’ve greased the experience wheel a little bit—or being baffled by friends who applied for unpaid internships assuming their parents would automatically pay a summer’s rent in NYC.