Rick Santorum made a jibe the other day about President Obama being a snob “because he wants everyone to go to college.” Coming from a man with three degrees and whose 2006 Senate re-election platform said he wanted every Pennsylvanian to have access to a college education, it came across as less heartfelt anger than as a weird attempt to pander to working-class sentiment.

Cynicism aside, it should be granted that college in the United States – well, everywhere really – is seen as being an irretrievably middle-class cultural activity. But it’s not just attending PSE which is middle-class; you can make an argument that wanting to go to PSE is itself a sign of middle-classness.

There is a large body of research which has established the difference in time-preferences between the long-term poor and the middle-class; basically, the poorer one is, the more likely one is to believe that consumption now is better than consumption later. I came across this research about eight years ago when I was working on problems of student debt, and found that it sat uneasily with the generally accepted notion that the poor were debt averse. If poorer people prefer immediate gratification to the deferred type, then surely they would love loans because the benefits are immediate and the drawbacks delayed. Until it hit me – poverty doesn’t create debt-aversion but investment-aversion. And since post-secondary education is a very big investment, requiring years of work and deferred income, it’s pretty obvious why it might deter people with a short-term time preference.

Obviously, I’m not the first person to have this insight. Renowned scholar Michael Sherraden, the pioneer of asset-based poverty reduction schemes (Canadian examples include the Canada Learning Bond and Learn$ave programs), had it twenty years earlier. But think about the implication for a moment: the pre-requisite to universal PSE must be a universalization of middle-class attitudes about money and investment.

Now, pace Santorum, not everyone on the American right thinks this is a bad thing. It’s essentially what Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve) recommends in his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America – rich people can best help poor people by getting them to adopt their values. Putting it that way may make you feel a little queasy, but in realty there’s less distance between Murray and, say, Pathways to Education than you’d think.

I don’t think we can totally discount Santorum’s insight that proselytizing middle-class values might create resentment in some quarters, even if we deplore his attempt to make political hay out of it. But there’s another question here: do we even know how to inculcate these values? More tomorrow.