The Surprising Ways College Students Think about Money: And How Christian Institutions Do Little to Help Their Thinking

“Tryna make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die”
Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Verve

I remember seeing an empirical finding as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s and often thereafter. The finding came from the First Year Survey given annually by the Higher Education Research Institution at UCLA. They gave first-year students a list of “objectives considered to be ‘essential’ or ‘very important’.” “Be very well off financially” has topped the list since 1976 (e.g., for 2019 it was top at 84.3%). In contrast, in the first year of the study in 1967, this item was only third at 54.2% with “develop a philosophy of life” being first at 79.1%.¹ I thus accepted the premise that college students understood their purpose and the purpose of higher education as being to make money.  

Until, that is, I started doing both qualitative and quantitative research on college students myself. I then realized that the conclusion I thought this evidence supported was not true. Students’ first-year objectives/goals are different than college students’ purposes or even what they think the purpose of higher education is.

College Students, Money, and Purpose

American college students do not come anywhere close to thinking that making money is the purpose of their own lives. In 2017, my co-authors and I commissioned Gallup to take a nationally representative poll that asked college students to rate—using a Likert scale.² —the twelve purpose ingredients we found most common in qualitative questions about purpose. When looking at the answers to which they strongly agreed, “making money” finished dead last.

The purpose of my life is to…	Strongly Agree	Strongly Disagree
Be happy	81.2	1.3
Care for a family	70.4	1.9
Experience life to the fullest	66.5	0.8
Build lasting friendships	56.6	1.1
Achieve success in my career	54.7	1.3
Maintain a comfortable standard of living	47.8	1.9
Discover new things about the world	47.3	11.4
Make the world a better place	46.9	1.0
Love God or a higher power	37.6	24.8
Serve my country or community	35.2	2.2
Produce new and original work	19.4	14.2
Make money	7.8	27.4

N = 2,507

The Purpose of Higher Education

I should note that in our nationwide qualitative research interviews among 110 students that established the items we asked on this survey, we found the same thing.³ Furthermore, the few students who did mention making money as an ingredient to their overall purpose came from poor backgrounds. I remember talking to one such student who had only recently acquired her citizenship. She observed how upper and middle-class students did not have to focus on money as a purpose because they had never been dirt poor.⁴

The Purpose of Higher Education

How about when it comes to the purpose of higher education? Do college students think the purpose of higher education is simply to help them make lots of money? My research team has asked 383 students at 26 different institutions across the nation (secular/religious, public/private) what they think is the purpose of higher education. Making more money or acquiring more assets was mentioned in less than 10% of the answers (9.6%).

Again, those who did focus on the purpose of college as helping one make more money came from impoverished or blue-collar backgrounds. Anthony (a pseudonym) shared this view of what he thought college would help him accomplish.

I guess to live a better life than what I grew up with. My mom attended college for a little bit of time, but she never ended up getting a degree or anything. So I guess just seeing how she struggled as a single parent, financially and mentally also, it made me want to go to higher education so I could have better financial stability when I have a career [and] when I have kids and a family of my own.

These students should not be criticized for wanting more money.

Many Westerners are too rich to realize that the instability of lacking money leaves deep emotional scars. My dad still does not talk in detail about trying to make it through college after his father both went to long term care facilities while he was in college (his dad was 52 when he was born). He was food insecure and poor. He never wanted his sons to go through what he endured (for which I am grateful).

So, let’s ask important questions about students who go into higher education to make money. Based on what I’ve seen, they are almost always the poor students who want to escape their stressful situations. We should also recognize that the objectives of a first-year college student are not necessarily their purposes or even what they think the purpose of higher education is. It all depends on how you ask the question and when.

The Second Problematic Empirical Reality

There is a second empirical finding regarding money that I recently discovered in my study of Christian higher education that surprised me. Christian institutions demonstrate little evidence that they teach students about how to steward money from a Christian perspective. One would think this aim should be a basic Christian art that every student should acquire and would be found in every set of general education courses. Simply reading through the gospel of Luke should reinforce the view. Yet, with only eight exceptions, nearly all of the 535 Christian colleges and universities in the U.S. neglect this topic in their general education courses.

Hardly any institutions require an economics or personal finance class. Of those that do, I only found a required personal finance course with even a trace of theological language at eight Christian colleges: Evangel University, Harding University, John Paul the Great University, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, San Diego Christian College, Trevecca Nazarene University, Roberts Wesleyan University, and Grace College.

Unfortunately, I also could not find a single description that I would consider exemplary. The Catholic course simply mentioned “tithing” in the course description and another Protestant institution oddly noted, “When possible, topics will be analyzed and discussed from a Christian perspective” as if there are times we can or should not have a Christian perspective. Instead, most descriptions simply stated that they approach the topic from “a biblical perspective,” “biblical framework,” or using the “Biblical concept of stewardship.”

I consider this finding amazing because it is actually in the self-interest of these colleges to teach such a class. After all, one should also want one’s alums to acquire a theological understanding of stewarding money, which might prompt them to give back to their university. Of course, I think there are also much higher Christian reasons for requiring such a general education class. To bear God’s image, students need to learn a Christian perspective on stewardship (a concept mentioned in only four of the courses). Interestingly, only one description moves beyond personal stewardship to preparing “students to understand the economic system from a Biblical perspective and how it affects individuals as consumers, producers, and citizens” (Grace College). That’s why when one recent historian claimed that one marker of evangelicalism is its support of “free-market economics” I laughed. Evangelical Christian colleges hardly even teach about financial stewardship–much less economic systems.

This finding is likely why I find so much sloppy economic thinking among Christian students and academics. We suffer from too many idealistic and ideological musings of religion, philosophy, or history PhDs who are disconnected in any way from the practical workings of flourishing or corrupt economies around the world today. Often, they throw out what sound like compassionate ideas without giving attention to whether those ideas actually promote human flourishing in practice (e.g. see for example the results of two recent major studies on universal basic income, here and here, or these recent studies on whether simply providing cash to the poor improves their health or maternal well-being—all not encouraging). Good intentions are valued more than outcomes.

So, how could we redeem Christian students and Christian higher education in this area? First, we should realize that making and managing money is an essential part of stewardship and we all must engage in both to steward both God’s creation and human creations (of which money is one). We also must empathize with the poor students who come to college hoping to make more money due to the poverty they experienced (while still warning against the dangers of greed).

Second, we should equip Christian students with an understanding of various theological perspectives about both personal finance and various economic systems as a whole. That endeavor should involve requiring a stewardship class that tackles both issues. Third, the redemptive solutions that Christians offer in their scholarship need to be tested both ethically and in the context of functioning economies. For instance, the contemporary versions of college debt forgiveness fail to come close to advancing economic justice on both of these levels.

If part of our goal in Christian higher education is to help students learn to understand all aspects of their lives through their faith, it is odd that subjects with such tremendous implications for one’s life—finances and economics—are overlooked. We are hardly in a place to complain about students’ perspectives regarding money or the economy if we neither have an adequate understanding of our students’ views of money nor provide theological resources or frameworks to equip them as financial stewards and caretakers of economic systems.

1. For the publications containing these findings see: https://heri.ucla.edu/publications-tfs/.
2. Perry L. Glanzer, Jonathan P. Hill, and Byron R. Johnson, The Quest for Purpose: The Collegiate Search for a Meaningful Life (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017).;
3. Glanzer et al., The Quest for Purpose.
4. There is a group that wants to “maintain a comfortable standard of living.” Within this group, there is likely quite a bit of greed disguised as a pursuit of comfort and these are likely students who want to be “well-off financially” to achieve those goals.