My Debt? Our Debt? Ambiguity and Advantage in Family Financial Assistance for Graduate School1

Abstract

Support for higher education is a known and well-documented venue for financial transfers within families, but practices of family support beyond college are less understood. Drawing on interviews with recent master's degree recipients who have student debt, I find key class differences in the process and forms of family financial assistance for graduate and professional education. Working-class young adults receive clear, mainly in-kind “business as usual” support that, while limited, is consistent with both expectations and prior support with undergraduate education. In contrast, despite proclamations of financial independence after college, young adults from middle-class backgrounds engage in an emotional “dance” of family assistance. They field ambiguous offers of support which often evolve into substantial financial transfers and receive that financial support with ambivalence, which minimizes the existence of support and their own agency in receiving it. This article illustrates how, even with anxiety and uncertainty in place of strategic institutional navigation, middle-class families transmit economic advantages that facilitate social reproduction. Rather than being a discrete, automatic transfer, intergenerational wealth transmission is contextual and comprised of everyday, relational processes.