What are we willing to sacrifice to make sure our kids get an education? I ask this question because it’s pretty clear to me that the answer is highly culturally specific. And our own culture doesn’t come out looking too good.

Families in Asian countries – particularly those from Confucian societies – don’t worry too much about things like affordability and student aid. Tiger mother stereotypes aside, there’s good survey evidence showing that it’s quite normal for even very poor families to put aside 20% or 30% of their income for the purpose of educating their children. In such countries, student aid is a pretty minor factor in access.

Many African countries are currently seeing a boom in higher education – and in a good number of them, it’s happening without any government student assistance programs. So how do they manage, given that fees are usually 2-3 times GDP per capita? Community resources, mainly. Everyone in a street or apartment building gets asked to contribute when one of their own go to school, and most people do manage to contribute a few dollars, knowing as they do that they will be able to count on those same neighbours when it comes time for their own children to go to school.

(This, by the way, is the kind of thing that makes development economics so heinously difficult. Try to institute a student loan scheme and the state pretty much ends up just displacing community support… meaning that the net beneficiaries aren’t students, but students’ parents’ neighbours. Sigh…)

Time used to be that some family sacrifice was expected in the West, too. But over the past twenty years, governments in Anglophone countries treated “sacrifice” like a bad word. When tuition was introduced in the U.K. in 1998, it was introduced with an income-contingent-like payment system to ensure that “parents would not have to pay a penny more.” In the United States, the main loan policy innovation of the 1990s was the creation of “unsubsidized” Stafford Loans for the upper-middle class whose kids weren’t eligible for the old subsidized variety. Moderately affluent Americans were perfectly capable of sacrificing present consumption to get their kids to school (they’d been doing it for the better part of forty years), they just preferred not to, so government obliged them by making it easier for their kids to indebt themselves instead.

The idea that our own middle classes are unable to pay more in tuition would seem nonsensical to African or Asian parents, who sacrifice far more to make sure their children get ahead. They just don’t seem to want to do so, given what’s on offer.

Why is that, exactly?