I wrote a long piece on class differences recently, Middle-Class Income Differentials Are Almost Inconsequential. As a follow up, I want to go into detail on an issue that you could describe as the “middle-class status trap”. In the aspirational part of the middle class, families spend a lot of money on giving their children a leg up. Sometimes they even go into debt to do so. The goal seems to be to give their kids the chance to get ahead in life and ideally reach a higher socioeconomic stratum. This can work, but it is risky, and it can very well be financially ruinous.

The perceived gateway to the upper classes is supposed to happen via expensive private schools, which have annual tuition fees that easily exceed the average pretax income in the country. There are obviously many more spots at such elite boarding or day schools available than there will be free seats at the high table in the future. Thus, you can easily make the claim that the expensive private school system is a strategy of the rich to deplete the resources of the striving middle class. Even if a few of the middle-class children succeed and, for instance, eventually become CEO of a larger company or Managing Director at a bank, most will not.

I have seen this phenomenon in real life as I attended some selective universities, on scholarships. I had peers whose parents had spent several hundred thousand pounds on their education, in an attempt to give them the best possible shot at a good career. It has been a while since I graduated, but a cursory look at LinkedIn tells me that quite a few of these people, a large majority in fact, ended up in careers that would have been accessible to them via a decent state school as well. Of course, the counter argument is that they may have ended up in a worse spot had they done so, but this is debatable as we are talking about people with decent academic track records. It is simply a game of numbers and even if we want to believe that everybody who studies PPE at Oxford can become Prime Minister, obviously hardly anybody will. The same is true for any other competitive career path.

International students seem to get screwed particularly hard as they pay much higher tuition fees. I know a case of someone from abroad who went through a selective degree program at one of the top UK universities, one with a brand name that is globally recognized. This cost about thirty thousand pounds sterling per year. Cost of living is not cheap either, and if you add flights and other expenses, you are looking at a bill of 150 to 200 thousand pounds for three years of study. This guy’s ambition was to break into investment banking in London, and the result was that, despite good academic results, he did not even manage to land an internship. Of course, without an internship, getting a full-time offer after graduation is a lot more difficult. He went back home and now works in a role that he could also have gotten, and arguably quite easily, with a degree from a decent local university. Had he or his parents invested all this money instead, he would now be in an infinitely better position.

I have a friend who went to a very elitist university. His family is middle class to upper middle class. They could afford sending him there but they surely had to budget for this. Yet, there were further expenses lurking. He told me that he racked up a lot of debt due to living expenses, and the reason was that he wanted to fit in. If your fellow students are wealthy and you have dinner with them at a nice restaurant, you want to feel as if you belong. If you ordered from the starters menu and asked for a glass of tap water, your rich friends probably would not want to hang out much with you in the future, and understandably so. He defended the expenses by wanting to have the “proper experience” of studying in such an environment, so he thinks it was money well spent even though it took him several years to pay off his debts. Today, he has a job for which the name of his university quite certainly helped. He would probably say that the money was kind of worth it. However, he also says that if he could start over, he would go into a different field, such as law, and go to one of the better local universities. If you do well, you can get into an international law firm this way, but there is the aspect that you probably need some of the upper class habits that are most effectively conveyed at private schools and elite universities.

With women, there is a different dynamic. As you are most certainly well-aware of, women are much more concerned about their appearance than men. They were early adopters of the iPhone, and the typical female wardrobe is normally a lot more expansive and expensive than its male counterpart. Interestingly, women seem to engage in a competition of intense resource depletion. Thus, sending a middle-class daughter to an expensive school could be a lot costlier than sending a son. Girls form cliques, and they are very often based on social status. You can imagine that a girl who wants to belong to the cool crowd at her school but does not have the right clothes or accessories will badger her parents relentlessly. There are more clothes than just the school uniform, after all. Effectively, there is a two-fold process of resource depletion at play: the elites set up the private school system to drain middle-class resources, and on top, the daughters of wealthy family exert additional pressure on middle-class girls to spend more money. All of this has the effect that the status hierarchy will largely be perpetuated.